At 1:04 pm -0500 29/11/99, John Cowan wrote:
[...]
>
>There are English-speakers who pronounce a /t/ in "often", too, but I don't
>know that I'd call that a dialect exactly. It may represent a
>hypercorrection,
It's a spelling pronunciation and has become increasingly more common over
here during my lifetime.
>like the American usual pronunciation of "nephew" as /nEfju/, instead of the
>historically correct /nEvju/ (still preserved in the U.K., I think?),
...by us old'uns, certainly.
But /nEfju/ is now quite common also - another spelling pronunciation.
[...]
>> > Trivium: "Straight" and its immediate derivatives are the only English
>> > words with "aigh"; it's pronounced [ej].
>> >
>>
>> I learned it with [E]. Is it a possible pronunciation in some
>>dialect?
>
>Maybe some, but I've never heard it.
Never heard it either.
Ray.
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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
[J.G. Hamann 1760]
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