Re: Cloakroom

Is "draw" for "drawer" a standard Aussie spelling?



On 5/13/08, Tristan McLeay <conlang@...> wrote:
> On 14/05/08 02:34:32, David McCann wrote:
> >
> > In Britain the term cloakroom (always one word) is still, and mainly,
> > used of a place where you deposit your coat. The use for a lavatory
> > (with a basin, unlike Australia) is entirely confined to estate
> > agents.
> > Incidentally, every new house now has to be built with a cloakroom in
> > this sense, to render it suitable for the disabled. Note also the
> > basin
> > (for American washing up) — a sink (for British washing up) is found
> > in
> > the kitchen.
> >
> > Although the British and Americans like to think they understand each
> > other, there's always something new. Until this discussion, I never
> > knew
> > Americans kept their clothes in a dresser. For us, a dresser is a
> > piece
> > of traditional kitchen furniture: a cupboard (with drawers for
> > "cutlery") with shelving above on which crockery is displayed.
>
> That's funny. At our old place, we had a "kitchen dresser" which
> might've satisfied your definition (in fact, it didn't have draws
> below, but cupboards with wood doors, so the good looking stuff was in
> the top section with glass doors and the rest was in the bottom
> section. But mum also had a dresser in which she kept her clothes
> (distinguished from say my chest of draws by having a mirror attached).
>
> Of course, it's hard to know whether a particular Australian use
> represents conserving an older form (that's since been lost in the UK)
> or adopting a newer form (from American English). Normally I'd say it
> was the latter (as with, say, the distinction between an apartment,
> which is expensive, and a flat, which is cheap), but household words
> are where most of the differences are, because they're not as common in
> the media.
>
> Also, backing up the thread slightly, do there exist any Germans who
> actually have [Oy] for the phoneme sometimes called /Oy/ and sometimes
> called /oi/ ? As someone who has both as distinct phonemes ([Oy], more
> commonly written as /@u\/, is the vowel in "no"; the second target is
> most definitely front, not central like u\ suggests) I've never heard a
> German person say "eu" in such a way that it sounds like anything but
> [oi], nor have I downloaded a recording of German sounds --- even one
> trying to demonstrate that "eu" is /Oy/ --- that makes it sound like
> anything but [oi] (or [Oi]). Is it contextual or dialectal or is it
> just an attempt to say "the phoneme isn't exactly identical to the
> English /oi/ as in 'boy', so we'll spell it differently", without
> actually using the difference to encode altered pronunciation.
>
> --
> Tristan.
>
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Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>

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