"old wise tale"/"old wives tell"

[Laurence Horn]

On Feb 18, 2014, at 10:53 PM, Herb Stahlke wrote:

> The Atlas of North American English shows the fill/feel merger in Southern
> Appalachians

Does that include Pittsburgh, home of the Stillers?

LH

> 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:
>
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>> -----------------------
>> 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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>>
>
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