[Lexicog] Re: Origins and meaning of "wimp" + Stressed out

[Rudolph C Troike]

On "wimp", I don't feel any implication of effeminacy, perhaps because
I don't interpret anything short of the ideal of machismo as automatically
implying something feminine. (Of course, there may be machismo ideologues
who do, just as there are ideologues of other stripes who see every social
situation as "contested" in some way or other or as reflecting struggle or
hegemony.) I'm sure that when I first heard the term, I subliminally at
least associated it with Wimpy, and phonaesthetically with "limp".

I suspect the source of John Roberts' problems with Singlish may actually
be Hindi (and other Indian languages). I often have a difficult time
understanding Indian speakers, which seems to be due to the fact that
intonational pitch peaks operate somehow independently of amplitudinal
stress, and since English stress is typically a combination of these and
vowel or syllable length, I hear the stress in the wrong places and have
to mentally deconstruct the input and reconstruct a probable target.

The reason for my guess as to the etiology of the Singapore pronunciation
is that I have found this same problem among some Thai speakers of English
and surmised that they may have come by it, either directly or by
inheritance, as a result of having teachers originally recruited from
India. The same could have been true of the Malay English which John
suggests as a possible source.


     Rudy Troike



 
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