"old wise tale"/"old wives tell"

[Herb Stahlke]

The Atlas of North American English shows the fill/feel merger in Southern
Appalachians west into Louisiana, and then again in North and West Texas.
The pull/pool merger is pretty much restricted to SW Pennsylvania.

Herb


On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 11:47 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: "old wise tale"/"old wives tell"
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 11:43 AM, Herb Stahlke <hfwstahlke at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > "Old wives tell" sounds like a Southern variety that laxes tense vowels
> > before /l/.
> >
>
> Is there one? In BE, "tell" for "tale," like "hill" for "heel" is peculiar
> to a few random hypercorrectors and not (stereo)typical at all of the rest
> of us, among whom "tale" for "tell" and "tale" and "heel" for "hill" and
> "heel" is, so to speak, the "standard," as it were.
> --
> -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
>
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