"Hog _Mawls_"

[Laurence Horn]

I'd heard about epenthetic L's for some time (Bryan Gick, a phonologist now head of department at UBC, used to post about them here and wrote them up in his Yale dissertation), but I had never witnessed any first hand--with Rs yes, hard to live in New England and not, but not with Ls--until I heard an audiobook of Patti Smith, from a Philly and South Jersey working-class background, reading her wonderful memoir about coming of age in New York (featuring Robert Mapplethorpe, with guest appearances by Janis Joplin, Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg, and the rest of the crew) from the 1960s to the 1980s.  Both she and Mapplethorpe did a lot of "drawling"--not the southern kind, but the drawlings on paper that you use drawling pencils for.  And yes, they would also "drawl" when there was no gerund or participle around.  Lots of other local pronunciations ("window" and "pillow" have clear terminal schwas), but nothing as striking to me as the intervocalic and final L's after /O/, precisely in "hog mawl" type contexts. Also in "external sandhi" contexts, e.g. "we sawl it".  

LH 


On Aug 26, 2014, at 10:33 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:

> The name of a country-music group.
> 
> "Hog _Mawls_ Plantation" : book title
> 
> "hog _mawls_ recipes" : epicurious.com
> 
> "I still don't like chitlins, hog _mawls_, or craclins!!!" : Facebook
> 
> Etc.
> 
> Reminiscent - *perhaps*! - of the "cowl" that I once used in place of
> "cow." By chance, I knew "hog _maws_" through reading, before I had
> occasion to try to guess the pronunciation/spelling on the basis of what I
> thought I was hearing.
> 
> "Craclins"?!!! In days of yore, pork _cracklings_ were as common a
> nickel-a-bag crap-food as potato chips. Well, in the 'hood, anyway.
> 
> -- 
> -Wilson
> -----
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
> come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> -Mark Twain
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org