Re: CHAT: F.L.O.E.S.

Tristan:
> I have a job at IKEA.
I'll thank you not to mention such unspeakable things!

If I ever organize an international terror network
of mujahideen sworn to destroy the canker that destroys
the fabric of virtuous society, its target of targets
will be that swedish fount of evil. Like most people,
I used to be mildly pro-Sweden until I was cast into
the inferno that is I**a. Now blue and yellow -- and
the Scandinavian style consensual egalitarian social
democracy embodied by that den of iniquity -- fills me
with unutterable horror.

> --- And Rosta <a.rosta@...> wrote:
> > > And did you mean that pizza itself comes from
> > America, or that
> > > British are adopting an American pronunciation of
> > the word "pizza"
> > > (which around here is consistently ['pit:s@])?
> >
> > Pizza itself. I have recently been hearing /'pAst@/
> > from English
> > mouths too, god help us.
>
> Pardon? I've always said 'pasta' the same as 'pastor'
> with my /a:/ (also found in 'farm', 'palm', 'father'),
> which I assume is the correct equivalent of your /A/,
> under the assumption that the same lengthening rule
> applied, either through age of borrowing or because
> that made it sound more English at the time of
> borrowing. I guess I'm kindav expecting to hear
> [p_h&st@] from Americans. Or did Australians borrow it
> from Americans? Or did you Brits re-borrow it?
A-lengthening in native vocab spread by lexical diffusion,
so /past@/ needn't be a reborrowing (i.e. it could be
that it simply escaped A-lengthening), and /pa:st@/
could be of any age, with a-lengthening applying to
pasta by force of analogy with lots of words in /-a:st@/ and
none in /-ast@/. Alternatively, it could, as you suggest, be
taken from AmE, but this seems unlikely, since pasta must
have become a feature of quotidian Australian life a bit
earlier than hearing AmE (on telly etc.) did.

--And.

Replies