[Lexicog] Re: Plough mud

[Benjamin Barrett]

I passed this thread along to the American Dialect Society where  
there has been follow-up.

Aloha from Maui
Benjamin Barrett
Seattle, WA

On May 25, 2010, at 7:07 AM, rtroike at email.arizona.edu wrote:

>
> David,
>
> Charleston is very much a speech island of its own, with a long
> history. The "gh" in English orthography, which is so troublesome
> to modern speakers, was there intentionally to represent the former
> phoneme /x/ (voiceless velar fricative), still found in Scots "loch"
> for "lake", and still used in cognate German words: Eng right, Ger
> richt, etc. The fricative was either absorbed into the vowel or not
> distinguished by children from /f/, which is acoustically very  
> similar,
> hence "laugh" (Ger lauchen) or occasionally /th/, as in Southern US
> "drouth" = "drought". Which pronunciations become "standard" and which
> remain "regional" is often a matter of historical accident (cf. leaf
> and deaf [Noah Webster preferred /dEf/), wreath and death (Scots / 
> diyth/).
>
> You can now search for terms in the Dictionary of American Regional
> English (DARE) at:
>
> http://dare.wisc.edu/?q=search/node
>
> I did a search for "plough mud" and "plow mud" but nothing came up, so
> they must have missed that. It's not in my OED either. That is  
> something
> they can include in a supplement.
>
> Rudy
>
> Rudy Troike
> Univ. of Arizona
>
> 

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