Re: USAGE: Weird dialectal stuff

Nik Taylor wrote:

> Barry Garcia wrote:
> > He gave two  examples of the dialect, pen and pin (I can't describe the
> > sounds accurately , but suffice to say, both words are said kind of in
> > between the sounds of both words) both sound the same,
>
> That's exactly like Southern American English before nasals, "pin" and
> "pen" are both /pIn/.  In this Fresno dialect, does this happen for
> *all* /I/ and /E/?  Are "pet" and "pit" homophones for him?
>
> On a Canadian show called "Kids in the Hall", there was a skit where a
> person was trying to find his pen, which he realized he had lent to
> someone, who didn't return it.  Anyways, throughout the skit he's saying
> things like "that's my pen!" using /E/, so everytime he said it, it
> sounded very odd to me!  :-)
Yeah, I know what you mean.  I remember in my World History class
in highschool when we had a teacher-in-training helping out the
teacher that day.  I remember distinctly she was talking about the Spanish
Armada, and used something like [t_hE:n] for "ten", which really weirded
me out. Since I didn't know at the time about the [I]/[E] variation among
some dialects, I thought she was trying to be consciously pretentious or
nonconformist or something...

But that lengthened [E:] was the strongest I've ever heard it used in my
presence.  From what I can tell from television broadcasts, the vowel used
by broadcasters is somewhere in between [I] and [E], though almost
indistinguishably so.

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Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
AIM: Deuterotom ICQ: 4315704
<http://www.angelfire.com/tx/eclectorium/>
"Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
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