[Ads-l] pronunciation of "onion"
Joan H. Hall
jdhall at WISC.EDU
Fri Dec 12 15:29:50 UTC 2014
DARE's first citation in the "Forms" section for "onion" is this:
1793 in 1794 Drayton Letters 58 Boston MA, They . . are taught to
pronounce the word first in its proper way, and then to contrast it with
the mode in which it is miscalled. . . Onions, [are called] Onions, [and
not] Inions.
That form was common through the 19th century, and one DARE Informant
from Georgia used it in 1966.
Forms of the type "ingern" were even more common, and were collected as
late as the LAGS fieldwork (published in the LAGS Tech. Index) in 1989.
Joan
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