"The Battle of Bataan" heard as

[Laurence Horn]

On Jan 13, 2013, at 9:54 PM, Herb Stahlke wrote:

> The American deaffrication of [dzh] usually occurs in foreign words or
> words thought by the speaker to be foreign, like Elijah, Fallujah, Beijing,
> etc.  I haven't noticed it much in native words or words that aren't proper
> nouns--and, yes, "assuage" comes from French in the 16th c. but is as
> nativized today as "language" [laeNgw at zh].

True, but if "garbage" can be denativized (as [gar'baZ]) and Target (as [tar'Ze:]), why not assuage?  Well, OK, because there's no joke there, but there might be in one of its anagrams; I can imagine someone noticing a $22.95 saucisson a l'ail dish on an upscale bistro menu and mocking it as [sO'saZ].

LH
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> On Sun, Jan 13, 2013 at 12:32 AM, W Brewer <brewerwa at gmail.com> wrote:
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>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>> -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       W Brewer <brewerwa at GMAIL.COM>
>> Subject:      Re: "The Battle of Bataan" heard as
>>
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> WG: <<<"The Battle of Bataan" heard as Ba-TAHN>>>
>> WB:  I struggle to have a label for the American predilection to replace
>> *a* [ae, ash] with *a* [AH]. (Didn't Mark Twain comment on the elegant
>> broad *a* [AH] vs. vulgar narrow(?) *a* [ash]?)  Something similar happens
>> with French borrowings into American English (hypergallicism), Fr. IPA [a]
>> (low, front) > AmE. [AH] (low, back), not [ae] (lower-mid, front):  In
>> elegantese, back *a* is euphonic, front *a* dysphonic. (All this doubtless
>> abetted by a perceived prestige of British English [AH] vs. SAE [ae] in
>> e.g. pass, dance, half).
>>   BTW, Randi Kaye on CNN the other day actually pronounced *assuage* as
>> [uh-swAHzh], with [ei] > [AH], [dzh] > de-affricated [zh]. (Something about
>> a woman who wanted to "assuage her testimony".)
>>
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