posted
Pee can is an acceptable pronunciation, but it's regional. I have a hard time saying picahn, but then again, I Mahm, and Tahm, instead of Mom and Tom. I also say wou-ter (like the ou in your) instead of wah-ter. And that's because my best friend was from Virginia and she pronounced it that way.
My worst accents indicators are on mahm and tahm though and that's a Chicago things. Or upper mid-west in general.
And people who say they don't have an accent, are the people from the mid-west. The whole non-accent you hear on TV is the no accent of this country. That's my opinion anyway. (And not the hick, country mid-west, but suburban mid-west.)
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posted
Is there a right and a wrong way to say "creek" then? Is that just a matter of regionality?
I have a problem with someone telling me that my regional way of pronouncing is "wrong".
Of course, I pronounce warm to rhyme with arm, farm, charm, smarm, and alarm. Makes perfect sense to me, but apparently the dictionary disagrees.
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quote:What I really don't like is when you say something to someone one way and they repronounce the word back to you and overemphasize the change.
Yeah, that's the kind of thing I'm talking about. But there are other ways of emphasizing it. One woman I know always looks me straight in the eye and nods her head when she says "ofTen." As if to remind me that she is aware of my "mispronunciation" and is making an effort to correct me. (She also insists that writing in the passive voice is always more "professional" than using any sort of personal pronoun)
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posted
Back to hard'n'soft business, there are a few thoughts regarding Hebrew.
In Temani pronunciation, a hard gimmel is "j" as in "Jon" but a soft one is "g" as in "gamble". What one can learn from parallelism is that the "original" hard sound of gimmel is "g" as in "gamble" (unvoiced "k") and that the soft "g" was a "gh" sound, like a voiced version of plat (sp?)-Deutsch "ch"; by that I mean the soft, "h"-similar sound, not the trilling "kh" like the Hebrew "Chet".
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posted
I guess it is supposed to be pronounced like "form". I can't think of any other words that truly rhyme with it, though. Though "war" is an example of the "ar" being pronounced that way. I certainly don't pronounce "war" to rhyme with "star, far, bar, mar, tar, par, jar, car, and Lieutenenat Yar."
English don't make no sense.
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I try to always point out to my children (well my son, since he is the only one really old enough) how bizarre and weird and rule-breaking English is so that he will appreciate the differences between languages. I see so many ignorant children/adults balk at the rule-breaking or bizarre rules in other languages. It makes me laugh.
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posted
There are times when it's normal and good to use the passive voice. Too many people, especially in the business world, think that everything should be passive. It's just like Calvin of Calvin & Hobbes said: "I realized that the purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!"
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quote:Originally posted by Kayla: Pee can is an acceptable pronunciation, but it's regional. I have a hard time saying picahn, but then again, I Mahm, and Tahm, instead of Mom and Tom.
I'm from Chicago, too. How else would you pronounce Mom and Tom? To me, it rhymes with bomb and calm and psalm and cd-rom.
I always laugh when people pronounce the second vowel in Chicago as shi-KAH-go. I say shi-KAW-go. And BAW-ston; not BAH-ston.
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quote:Originally posted by Glenn Arnold: She also insists that writing in the passive voice is always more "professional" than using any sort of personal pronoun
<blink> If she tells you that you should use the passive voice, ask her if she doesn't mean that the passive voice should be used.
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posted
Warm rhymes with form, and dorm, and such. Clearly, "Worm" is already taken and it sounds like "Werm", or I suppose "Wirm" and "Wyrm". EDIT: Oh, and Wurm, too.
Anything but "Worm".
I love the way English makes no sense! Am I the only one?
Also, what exactly is the passive voice?
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quote:<blink> If she tells you that you should use the passive voice, ask her if she doesn't mean that the passive voice should be used.
I'm not sure she knows what the passive voice is. It's just that she insists that we should never use personal pronouns, and all the examples she gives are in the passive voice.
i.e. Instead of "I observed the student," we're supposed to say "The student was observed."
But yeah, I should try that somehow.
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posted
I was told never to use "I" in a formal essay, e.g. "I think that..." or "In this essay I shall examine..." I think that what was probably what your teacher was getting at.
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starLisa, I'm thinking you pronounce Mom more like mawm than mahm. It's kind of hard to explain. It's more of a back of the throat/nasal kind of thing. But listen to Joan Cusak talk. It's like that. For a lot of the words, you don't notice, but then every once in a while, bam.
You know, rereading your response, I'm not sure how you say any of those words. Since I say them all the same, and I don't know which way you say them, I can't figure it out.
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posted
I'm an engineer, and we never used first person in technical writing (i.e., "I calibrated the meter and we measured the flow."); passive voice is practically all that's left to work with. ("The flow was measured with a GX-K84 volumetric meter...")
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posted
There's a difference between the typical American pronunciation and the Canadian pronunciation (and apparently Chicago, too). I don't remember the technical language to describe it because I was never very good at vowels, but think of trying to pronounce something between "mom" and "mam" and you'll get pretty close to the way Canadians and people from Chicago would pronounce it. That's true of all of the words with the "ah" sound I believe.
quote: I was told never to use "I" in a formal essay, e.g. "I think that..." or "In this essay I shall examine..." I think that what was probably what your teacher was getting at.
No, this was for our personal observation journal. We wrote observation reports separately. And she wasn't my teacher.
"This is not a diary, it's a professional journal." She also says don't use "he" or "she" when referring to a student. It's always "the student." To refer to ourselves we use "the teacher." This is especially confusing when you're observing another teacher. Then it's "the observing teacher" and the "classroom teacher." Before I was certified it was "the teacher candidate."
Still, all of her examples (that I can remember) were in the passive voice. And some of them were ridiculously convoluted. But it was "professional."
By the way, I don't object to the passive voice when it makes sense. I think it's just as bad to say "NEVER use the passive voice." But I've seen engineers use it to the point of the ridiculous also. You just have to read what you've written and see if it's understandable.
BTW, Irregardless: My previous career was in industrial gases. I wrote a lot of reports and memos on calibrating flows.
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quote:Originally posted by theCrowsWife: There's a difference between the typical American pronunciation and the Canadian pronunciation (and apparently Chicago, too). I don't remember the technical language to describe it because I was never very good at vowels, but think of trying to pronounce something between "mom" and "mam" and you'll get pretty close to the way Canadians and people from Chicago would pronounce it. That's true of all of the words with the "ah" sound I believe.
--Mel
It sounds like you're referring to the Northern Cities Shift. But according to everything I've read, it's not happening in Canada. It stretches from Syracuse, New York, to Minneapolis, Minnesota.
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quote:Originally posted by starLisa: I always laugh when people pronounce the second vowel in Chicago as shi-KAH-go. I say shi-KAW-go.
Then you would probably laugh at the entire population of Chicago. Maybe you should tell them they're pronouncing the name of their city wrong.
Seriously, would you laugh at an Englishman for pronouncing something different? What about an Australian? How about someone who didn't speak English as their first language? What makes a regional accent within the United States different from a regional account from without the United States?
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posted
Actually, if you check a dictionary the "t" in often is supposed to be silent. The change began with Princess Di, who pronounced it that way all the time and it's grown from there.
Note: this is not to say anything derogatory about Princess Di. Also, I am sure that there are many other people who pronounced it that way, but at the time, she was the famous person who did.
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quote:Originally posted by Glenn Arnold: BTW, Irregardless: My previous career was in industrial gases. I wrote a lot of reports and memos on calibrating flows.
You didn't just say "irregardless", did you?
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quote:Originally posted by starLisa: I always laugh when people pronounce the second vowel in Chicago as shi-KAH-go. I say shi-KAW-go.
Then you would probably laugh at the entire population of Chicago. Maybe you should tell them they're pronouncing the name of their city wrong.
You must not know many Chicagoans. Most of us actually do pronounce it shi-KAW-go. It's other people who aren't from here who more often say shi-KAH-go. Some of them even pronounce Florida as FLAHR-da.
quote:Originally posted by Jon Boy: Seriously, would you laugh at an Englishman for pronouncing something different? What about an Australian? How about someone who didn't speak English as their first language? What makes a regional accent within the United States different from a regional account from without the United States?
<shrug> I didn't say I laughed out loud. That'd be rude.
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quote:You didn't just say "irregardless", did you?
Yes, I was addressing the poster whose username is Irregardless.
I recently ran into an interesting thing about "irregardless" (the word, not the person). If you read "Li'l Abner" comics from the 1950's, you'll see that Al Capp used the word "irregardless" as an indication of Li'l Abner's (and other characters) lack of education. He used it a lot, so I have to wonder how much that contributed to today's usage of the word.
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quote:You didn't just say "irregardless", did you?
Yes, I was addressing the poster whose username is Irregardless.
I recently ran into an interesting thing about "irregardless" (the word, not the person). If you read "Li'l Abner" comics from the 1950's, you'll see that Al Capp used the word "irregardless" as an indication of Li'l Abner's (and other characters) lack of education. He used it a lot, so I have to wonder how much that contributed to today's usage of the word.
Pop culture can do things like that. I heard a story that the pronounciation of Caribbean that sounds like ke-RIH-bee-in came about because there was a popular song that mentioned the Caribbean, and in order to fit the rhythm of the song, the singer changed the pronunciation.
Normalcy, which used to be normality, apparently came into existence in a presidential speech ("a return to normalcy"). Nowadays, the word normality is rarely used outside of chemistry.
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quote:Originally posted by theCrowsWife: There's a difference between the typical American pronunciation and the Canadian pronunciation (and apparently Chicago, too). I don't remember the technical language to describe it because I was never very good at vowels, but think of trying to pronounce something between "mom" and "mam" and you'll get pretty close to the way Canadians and people from Chicago would pronounce it. That's true of all of the words with the "ah" sound I believe.
--Mel
It sounds like you're referring to the Northern Cities Shift. But according to everything I've read, it's not happening in Canada. It stretches from Syracuse, New York, to Minneapolis, Minnesota.
*shrug* It was a Canadian professor who told me that Canadians do that. Unless I'm remembering him wrong. That's certainly possible; it's been a few years since I took that class.
Linguistics is fun, but I was always better at syntax than phonetics/phonology.
quote:Originally posted by starLisa: You must not know many Chicagoans. Most of us actually do pronounce it shi-KAW-go. It's other people who aren't from here who more often say shi-KAH-go. Some of them even pronounce Florida as FLAHR-da.
All the Chicagoans I've known (which, granted, is not very many) have pronounced it with the aforementioned Northern Cities Shift, so it either has the vowel in hot or is slightly further forward, about halfway between hot and hat.
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posted
There's is definately a certain amount of "a" in the word "Mom" as pronounced in Ontario, at least...
"Mahm", basically, as opposed to using the more narrow and closed-mouth "Mom" sound.
I'm sure there are plenty of dialects all over the world that pronounce the "t" and the Princess Diana wasn't the first person to do it. In fact since the "t" is there it probably was put there for a reason.
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quote:Originally posted by starLisa: Normalcy, which used to be normality, apparently came into existence in a presidential speech ("a return to normalcy"). Nowadays, the word normality is rarely used outside of chemistry.
It wasn't coined by a president, but it appears to have been popularized by one. But it's not really accurate to say that it "used to be" normality. Normality precedes normalcy by only about a decade, according to the OED.
quote:Originally posted by theCrowsWife: *shrug* It was a Canadian professor who told me that Canadians do that. Unless I'm remembering him wrong. That's certainly possible; it's been a few years since I took that class.
Interesting. I don't know enough Canadians to say if he's right or not, unfortunately. Most of the Canadians I know are from Alberta, and they don't have very strong accents. I do know a girl from Ontario, and I've never heard that vowel shift from her or her brothers. Hmm.
Of course, it could be that it's only recently started to spread into Canada, so the surveys and data I've seen aren't current enough to show that.
Edit: Aha! That's interesting, Teshi. Now if you could just post some sound clips of yourself so I could actually hear it . . .
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posted
I would, but I have no sound recording facilities. Also, I may be wrong about the sound, but all the time I've been around in Canada it's been "mahm" and "bahmb" etc.
I'll try and describe the sound. It's not a bright sound, it's a dark "ah", like an opera singer singing on the vowel "a". Like the sound in "farm" only without the "r".
You might want to ask another Canadian, too.
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posted
That description sounds exactly like the standard, non-shifted a sound. I think the difference you're noticing is that in North America, this sound is pronounced without rounding the lips at all, while in Britain, it is pronounced with rounded lips. Lip-rounding enhances the backness of a sound, so an unrounded vowel will sound a little brighter.
Here's a vowel chart. In Britain, mom and bomb are pronounced with an open back rounded vowel (bottom right corner). In North America it's open back unrounded (to the left of that). In the Northern Cities Shift, it's closer to open front unrounded (bottom left corner). The vowels in cat and hat are near-open front unrounded.
[ September 21, 2005, 12:58 PM: Message edited by: Jon Boy ]
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posted
Ah- so it's not bright enough to be this shifted vowel. It feels bright to me, because I am going from the British "bomb" sound (Mom is usually Mum so it's not a good example).
I think it's certainly approaching such a "a" sound though, in some people's accents.
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I used to work at a photo lab and it was surprising to me how many people pronounced it fill 'em.
Also, I don't pronounce the 't' in often.
Albertans have accents. Especially those from southern Alberta. It is just that their accent is a U.S. accent. They sound a lot like the people I know from Washington State.
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