General American, Iago and other irrelevancies

[hickling@xxxxxxxx (Lee Hickling)]

   If I were the list manager I'd say, "Hey, guys, enough." But this
is fun, so

Someone (I couldn't tell who) posted more off-topic rambling ....
>
>My Branch Office Manager, an African-American woman, grew
>up in southern Mary-land. She always calls it "Murr-lunn", and
>talks about taking her son to John's Hopkins Medical Center in
>"BALLmurr."

   If you listen closely, don't you hear a very short "uh" between
Murr and lunn, and Ball and murr? I do.

> She also inverts the letters in the word meaning "make an inquiry,"
>as in "I AXED Denice if you had filled out those forms."

   I hear that too, but it's southern white as well as black dialect.
Interestingly, in Anglo-Saxon (Old English) the verb was acsian,
pronounced AXE-ee-un. The consonants got switched by a linguistic
process known as metathesis. Burnt, for instance, once was brent.
   What I don't know is whether "I axed him" is a new metathesis, which
restored the word to its original form, or a persistence of the older
form. There are a lot of the latter in American country dialects. "Deef" for
deaf is merely the survival of an 18th century pronunciation that was
abandoned in standard English.
   Forgive me. I get carried away on this subject.

>As someone who grew up in Seattle (hence NO regional accent
>whatsoever), I get a kick out of regional differences.

   Well, my friends from the Pacific Northwest do speak a fairly pure
General American. Years ago when the linguist Leonard Bloomfield
drew the first dialect map of this country he had a problem. Normally
the speech of a capital -- Rome, Paris, Moscow -- becomes the standard
form. There was no uniformity in the way people in Washington, DC,
talked, so Bloomfield decided to make his General American the forms
he recorded in a strip from western Massachusetts through central New
York, Ohio and on through northern Indiana into Illinois. As a native
Upstate New Yorker, I certainly think he got it right.

   If I'd had the poster's e-mail address, I'd have sent this to him or her
and kept it off the list. It would be a good rule for all of us to put our
addresses somewhere in the body of a message. Some mail lists
require it.

Lee Hickling            
hickling@xxxxxxxx