[Ads-l] Facebookery: _are_ > "our"

[Wilson Gray]

An essentially irrelevant anecdote

Years ago, I read in NewsTIME you could tell a catholic Northern Irishman
from a Protestant Northern Irishman by the way that each pronounced the
name of the letter, _H h_. Catholics used "haitch," whereas Protestants
used the expected "aitch."
As chance would have it, a fellow-Catholic had met two
Northern-Irish-Catholic women and called me to make a fourth. A chance to
find out whether what I had read was true!

After a half-hour or so of chit-chit, I popped the question: is it true,
what they say, that Catholics say "haitch"? Since I believed what I had
read, I was shocked, shocked! when they answered, "No, that's not true."

Well, what do you say, then?

We say "he-etch" [hı.ɛtʃ], not [hɛıtʃ].

On Tue, Jun 19, 2018 at 8:41 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
wrote:

> > On Jun 19, 2018, at 7:51 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> >
> > Black male commenter, ca.45-50, a native of Arizona:
> >
> > "... they _our_ no longer working with the data ..."
> >
> >
> > Chomsky, from Philly, also pronounces _our_ as "are." Trump, from NYC, my
> > wife, from Wilkes-Barre, PA, and my mother, from Longview, TX, all
> > pronounce, e.g. _huge_, as "yuge," but only Mom pronounces _humble_ as
> > "umble."  It must take ten men and a boy to draw isoglosses for cases
> like
> > these.
>
> My own NYC dialect (b. 1945) has “our” and “are” as frequent homonyms—I’m
> pretty sure I vary between /aur/ and /a:r/ for the former, although not for
> the latter—but I have an /h/ in “huge”, “humble”, and “Hugh”, although I
> remember a number of my landsmen didn’t.  (The one that especially confused
> me as a child was the proper name “Hugh”, pronounced as a second-person
> pronoun.)
>
> Speaking of haitches, is anyone familiar with non-Cockney varieties in
> which the latter H is pronounced with an initial /h/?  I’ve never heard
> that in the U.S. and the OED doesn’t list that as a variant, but an
> Australian podcast narrator who otherwise speaks standard Aussie English
> (as far as I can tell) consistently uses /heiC/ (or [heitʃ]) when
> pronouncing initialisms like “HIV” and “HPV”.
>
> LH
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



-- 
-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