Re: New Englishisms

Tom Wier wrote:

> Brian Betty wrote:
> > 1. clip everything. I say ev'ry, ev'rything, p'sition (not position, but
> > pzishin).
> > This often leads to a weird vowel harmony thingie when you get
> > this really long word with all the vowels collapsed /klaepst/ to /i/ or
> > /@/. Prescription /pr@skripshn/. Elimination /ilimineyshn/. Christmas
> > /krismis/. Et cetera.
I do this to a very limited extent. Too much of this, to my ear, sounds
like prim, anglophile, little-old-lady speech.

> > "What are you
> > doing?" > /'(h)warryu 'du:ing?/.
> That's interesting that you have that voiceless /w/ there.  Is it that common
> up there?
I use this extensively in careful speech and almost always with
interrogatives in sentence initial position.

> > 3. talk really, really fast, so that when you travel out of New England
> > people say "What? What? What?" all the time. Usually followed by, "Slow
> > down, say it again."
I haven't felt this. In fact, to me, Maine and rural New Hampshire
speech is comedically slow. Southern NE (a la New Canaan) speech might
be faster, but I attribute that to the influence of *that* city. For
true rapid fire speech, check out Rochester /raSst'/, NY.

> > 4. I say /o:fn/ (o: is aw in law).
> Yeah, I would think so.  In my dialect, and I would suppose most
> Western dialects, that's become /A/ or even /a/.  (For me, the former)
I think I've got /afn/ here, but then, I don't really have a Boston
accent. As I've assumed is common in SAE, I don't distinguish between
/a/ and /O/.

cock/caulk  dawn/Don...no discernible difference.

> > 5. I claim to recognise the audible difference between Mary, marry, and
> > merry, which to my Oregonian roommate is all /meri:/ (here r = American r)
> > and to me is /maeri:/, /mae:ri:/ and /meri:/, respectively.
For me, Mary and merry are homonyms, /mEri/; marry is /m&ri/ (I assumed
this also was SAE).

> > 6. many New Englanders don't have ahs (rs), as is probably familiar to many
> > people on this list. Others, like myself, overcompensate and have rs coiled
> > up like a little ball of rubber bands. Uberrhotic, I reckon.
Besides my step-mother (from Brockton, MA), no one in my family drops
r's. My mother, after several years in NH, began adding r's on some
vowel-final words: idear (yuck!). In fairness, though, I pronounce
theatre /Tirtr/.

> > 7. Also, ts are frequently replaced by glottal stops, especially in
> > syllable-final position: hi' for hit. si' for sit.
Moi aussi, but again, I assumed this was fairly widespread Stateside.

> > The oddest thing is that people in New England also say y'all. That might
> > be because of the influence of the universities ... But y'allses is
> > definitely out.
>
> Well, it does exist in England (or did, at any rate).  Coulda come from
> there. Or perhaps from the exodus of blacks after the Civil War?
> Dunno.  What kind of social status does it have?  Is it stigmatized?
Granted I've been away a while, but I've never heard *any*one in New
England use "y'all" unless they were mimicking or mocking Southern
speech. Major stigma time from where I sit.

Kou