Pronunciation of Drawing and Law & Order

Cheers,

Matt

"Loranorder" occurs in non-rhotic and quasi-non-rhotic American
accents. My father (a mainly non-rhotic New York speaker) used that
pronunciation, for example, and I remember Justice David Souter (a
non-rhotic New Hampshire native) said "lore is"
for "law is" during his confirmation hearings back in 1990 (?).

"Droring" occurs in some of the same accents, and, as I've noted, it
can also occur at least in rhotic American accents that are situated in
close proximity to non-rhotic ones. For example, I seem to remember
saying "droring" when I were a child, and I have a rhotic accent
(Postwar Prestige Standard). I never said "lorandorder", however, or
anything like that. I don't know if "droring" is actually a much more
widely used American child-ism.

Incidentally, I object strongly to your implication that "American
English" is not "English".

> [...]

Why do you infer that? He implied that it isn't "colloquial normal
English".

Matti

I'd agree that the original post did not imply that "American English
is not English", but the construction *did* differentiate between
"American English" and "colloquial normal English".

Taking issue with that would be reasonable: in what way is American
English either not "colloquial" or not "normal"?

--
Cheers,
Harvey

By normal English, I meant normal as in English spoken in England. Sorry
if there was any confusion. I have been known to call it any of the
following things: "English English", "normal English", "standard
English", "proper English" etc. It's not meant to offend anybody.

By colloquial, I meant you wouldn't say "droring" in formal speech. I
should have put "colloquial American English" for the second one,
anyway, but that should have been implied.

Can we get back on-topic please?

Incidentally, I was playing a helicopter game at a friend's house, and
doing the training missions, and the person who did the speech for the
training says "yar" instead of "yaw" for the motion of the helicopter. I
assume that's a regionalisation as well. I believe the game's a
Microsoft one that comes with the Sidewinder joystick. Apache or
something.

Cheers,

Matt

Yeah, it happens...usually perpetrated by people who say
"Worshington"....r

I'll get back to you when I've assimilated the concept of "colloquial normal
English".

Matti

I think that's completely unrelated -- the people who say Warshington
don't overlap with the lorandorder people.

So you're saying that American English is abnormal, nonstandard, and
improper?

C'mon, REF, give him the answer: "British English," abbreviated
"BrE." "Tis better to light one candle ...

--
Bob Lieblich
Although there are times when a torch might be better

There may be some overlap, but I don't hear people who "warsh" their face
say lawr, dror, or even Korear or idear.
Richard... do you know of one of those funny lines across the map that
delineates a "warsh zone"? I have heard it from people of North Carolina,
Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, and parts of Wisconsin. I don't think Wisconsin
is cut off from Missouri and Iowa, so I expect areas of Illinois and Indiana
might say it, too. My brother-in-law(r), 40+ years away from Hicksville,
L.I. doesn't say warsh, but still says Korear and "rawr eggs".

I don't think so. I grew up saying "Worshington", "worsh your hands", etc.,
but never, never "lawr and order" or "drawring". I'd associate the latter
two with the Boston or New York areas, I grew up near Pittsburgh. Where'd
y'uns grow up?

"Warsh" is said to be a feature of the Midland dialect, which cuts
across the middle of the US (though after the Rocky Mountains it
disperses throughout the West). Wisconsin seems a bit high for the
Midland -- ILIU on Labov's maps but whenever I do that in Windows my PC
crashes. Southern Illinois, Indiana and Iowa are in the Midland.

"Korear" and "rawr" sound more like the non-rhotic-and-friends accent
features I spoke of. My mother is a rhotic speaker but she (who lived
in Boston till age 5) sometimes adds on an /r/ at the end of a word
that ends in a schwa normatively. For example, I grew up learning the
word "polar shirt" /poUlRSRt/ -- this was actually my mother's
pronunciation of "polo shirt".

Well, unless "polar shirt" is something different? Google says:

"polo shirt" 129000
"polar shirt" 93

Actually, thinking about this further, there's no reason to assume that
"polo" => "polar" is something you'd expect only in the
nonrhotic-and-friends accents. Think of the rural American
stereotypical pronunciations like "yeller" for "yellow", "feller" for
"fellow". It's probably something like that: even in rhotic American
accents a final /oU/ can become /@/ or /R/.

You're probably right...my main referent for "Worshington" (not the same as
"Warshington", which I *have*--however--heard) is my own mother, who spent her
first decade less than fifty miles from where I spent mine, but who seems to
have a completely different accent...(I'm that seldom-seen species, a
Californian CINC)...it would never occur to me to pronounce "wash" with an
R...(my vowel in that syllable is [a], Mom's is [o])....

I think a combination of rhoticity and some kind of CIC/CINC issue conspire to
create the "lorandorder" and "droring" effects...someone who uses [o] in "law"
and "draw" is going to need some way to segment the syllable from the vowels
that follow, and [r] is one way of doing that; it's less necessary for those of
us who use [O] in those words, and I sense a bit of an [u]-ward glide in my own
case as well....

I recall being asked when I signed up for classes for seventh grade whether I
wanted to take something that sounded like "Mechanical Droyne" and which
ultimately proved to be a drafting class...this is what happens when a CIC
person tries to say "Drawing" quickly without inserting some kind of
intersyllabic stopper...(I imagine such a person might say "Lawn Order", and I
seem to recall mentioning "mirror" as /'mi jR/ here before)....r

I dunno if Californian CINCs are so seldom seen. If we include
migrants *to* California, you have all those Eastern people who settled
in California, one. But two, Labov's maps indicate that the major
metropolitan areas of California are in fact islands of CINCness.

Could be. I myself feel that this intrusive r stuff is done a bit more
comprehensively by Eastern New England non-rhotics than by, say, New
York non-rhotics.

Richard answered this one.

Okay. In the U.S. I associate "lor and o'duh" and "the idea rof it"
with eastern New England, as Richard said. Specifically with hearing
my parents or their contemporaries imitate President Kennedy saying
"the Cuba rarea". I was surprised to see people saying they'd heard
it elsewhere.

What do you mean by "yar"? If the voice really had an r sound at the
end, that would extremely rare in my experience in the U.S.

If you mean "yah", then I see two possibilities. One is that the
speaker was from the enormous area (much of it sparsely populated)
where "cot" is pronounced the same as "caught" ("cot is caught" or
"CIC", as people around here call it). You can see this area inside
the green isogloss in the first map in William Labov's article at
<http://www.ling.upenn.edu/phono_atlas/Atlas_chapters/Ch11/Ch11.html>.
As the article says, for Americans outside New England, "cot" has the
same vowel as "father", "taco", etc., so "yaw" would have that same
"ah" vowel too.

The other possibility is that the speaker was from the areas where
"cot" is not "caught" but is similar. In Labov's terms, the /oh/
phoneme of "yaw" hasn't been raised. I'm from such an area
(Cleveland), and my "aw" sounds very different from the vowel in my
"or". It's a good deal lower (my mouth is wider open) and not far at
all from my "ah". In fact, I fit into Labov's "approximating system".
I suspect that for you "yaw" is the same as "yore" in colloquial
speech, and my "yaw" would sound to you a lot like your "yar".

So the speaker was probably not from Labov's "Eastern corridor"
(roughly Rhode Island to southern Virginia). The remaining area is
too big to call its pronunciation regional.

--
Jerry Friedman

Yes, the only correct English is the Queen's English. You Americans have
butchered our language over the years. Do stupid Americans not
understand the link between ENGLand and ENGLish?

JJ

Surely the r is only added if the next word begins with a vowel, as in
your rawr eggs example. So it'd be pronounced like roar eggs then? As
far as I am aware, people only add Rs if if becomes otherwise awkward to
say. So instead of saying "dror" (non-rhotic) then "ing" some people
insert the R to separate the two vowels. I think...???

JJ

I cannot deny your suggestion, as I have very little experience with this
"Korear" aspect. I believe my brother-in-law says "idear, Korear" with
those words in final position. I live in Wisconsin, where that speech
pattern isn't common. I mention it only as a backup to Richard's statement
that "Warshington" doesn't truly coexist with the "rhotic" speech. (I think
that is what he was saying.)

In fact, he lists the "warsh" sound as "Midland" and I must agree that I
don't hear "warsh" often in Wisconsin, which is considered "Inland North", I
believe, in dialectal location.

No, "Warshington" doesn't truly (or rey or franke) coincide with
*non-rhotic* speech, TTBOMK.

Yes.

I knew I would get this wrong. Somehow, the adding of an unspelt (sp?)
sound of "r", being a positive act, would at first appear to need a
"positive" description. But I know if I am given a choice of 2
alternatives, I will choose the wrong one.

I replied in a private e-mail, and Matt Davis has asked me to
posted my comments here. I no longer have what I e-mailed. I said
that most Americans do not ever insert these intrusive "r"s, that I
first heard of them when I was 15 years old, and that they always
startle me every time I hear them. It's as if you poked me with a
needle. (Two or three weeks ago I mentioned in this newsgroup a
Bostonian who had called my Visa application my "Visa Rapplication".
Many Bostonians and some New Yorkers are unlike most Americans in
this respect; they are non-rhotic.

I also said it is erroneous to regard American English as
abnormal, especially since it preserves many usages (e.g., "gotten",
to mention one that's been discussed here lately) that were standard
in England 250 years ago and have fallen into disuse there but not
here. Rhoticism is one example; 400 years ago non-rhotic dialects
were just emerging in England; 150 years ago audible pronunciation
of the "r" in "art", etc., was still considered more correct in England
than non-rhotic pronunciation. Most non-rhotic speakers, who drop the
"r" in "art", add intrusive "r"s and say "Visa Rapplication" and the
like; most rhotic speakers, who audibly pronounce the "r" in "art",
say "Visa application", with no audible "r" between "visa" and
"application".

We Americans are linguistic traditionalists by comparison to
the British. -- Mike Hardy

<snip>

I agree that it is erroneous to regard AmE as abnormal, but there are two
points I'd like to make here. First, I'm sure that there are also many
examples where British English is more conservative - off the top of my
head, very few (if any) of us merge "ah" and "short O" so that "father" and
"bother" rhyme, whereas most Americans (away from eastern New England) do.

Second, rhoticity hasn't fallen into disuse here. It's not the RP
pronunciation, true, but visit Bristol or Glasgow for a day and you'll see
what I mean. This reminds me of Bill Bryson's claim (in Mother Tongue,
p.163) that the short A of "bath" and "path" has died out in Britain. I
wonder whether he listened to his neighbours in Yorkshire?

Jonathan

Yes, I think there are many other examples of "British conservatism" in
both pronunciation and grammar/idiom. Most Americans -- maybe most
British people too, but I'm not sure -- naturally would assume that
"younger country" (USA) = "language with newer, less conservative
features". But it turns out, though it's counterintuitive to the naive
thinker, that "colonies" -- by definition newer settlements by members
of the relevant speech community -- in some cases end up preserving
some features of pronunciation, grammar etc. that die out in the "mother
country" -- we see this also for example in the Scandinavian languages.

So Americans, anyway, are always shocked at first to learn that their
language has some relatively "archaic" features. It's sort of a
mind-altering kind of thing. Of course, once you start thinking about
it, it becomes pretty obvious. But anyway, my point is that we tend to
emphasize the "archaic" features of American English for this reason.

What's archaic and what isn't isn't always clear anyway. Take
rhoticism. In the US, from a recent-historical perspective,
non-rhoticism is more archaic. That is, where it persists it's because
of the persistence of older speech patterns generally, and more modern
tendencies tend to cause non-rhoticism to disappear.

You capitalise the 'ENG' to emphasise the original meaning of 'narrow', no
doubt.

--
Rob Bannister

Is there an English that cannot possibly be identified, in its present
condition, as its origin being either the mother tongue, or one of its
colonizations? That is, is there a vocabulary one could use that would not
point back to the writer using BrE, AmE or any other particular English
dialect?

The stupid ones don't; the rest do. Do smart Brits understand the link
between "arseholes" and certain newsgroup posters?
--

Charles Riggs

Others are that most varieties of British English retain /ju/ for "long U"
in many situations where most Americans have /u/, and we distinguish
between "t" (even if it's /?/) and "d" where Americans appear not to.

David

That would seem to be so. Note that Americans distinguish
initial /t/ from /d/ (e.g., "tot" and "dot" are not homophones)
and (in isolation) final /t/ from /d/ (except maybe in Southern New
Jersey).

More interestingly, Americans generally distinguish /t/ from
/d/ following /n/ and /l/, even when a vowel follows: e.g. "cantor"
vs. "candor", "alter" vs. "alder". Strangely, this does not extend to
/r/ when a vowel follows the /t/ or /d/: "carter" = "carder".[1] Maybe
that's related to why there's lots of non-rhoticism in the Anglophone
world but not as much non-lambdicism (outside of the Southeastern
England Speech Community) or non-nuicism.

[1]I can remember thinking for a long time that the slang expression
"to card" someone (to request identification showing proof of
sufficient age to purchase alcoholic beverages or enter a licensed
alcoholic-beverage-dispensing establishment, especially when refusal
of said purchase or entry ensues) was actually "to cart" someone, as I
usally heard it used in the form "carded". Maybe in part I was
thinking of how "cart" might mean "to move from one place to another by
means of a cart" -- I think I had some image of kids being forcibly
pushed out of a bar or alcoholic beverage store in a shopping cart.

Part of the problem there was that the original basis for "to card" had
sort of been lost. When you're "carded", you generally are or just had
been requested to display some sort of substantial proof of age,
typically a driver's license (= S.US "licen"). I simply have never
thought of a driver's license as a "card". But apparently when the
expression first arose driver's licenses looked more like traditional
"cards", or what people thought of as "cards" back then, and people
also might have had "draft cards" showing proof of
age. "ID card" is meaningful to me, and in fact it typically refers to
something similar in size and material to a driver's license, but I
don't really think of an "ID card" as a type of "card" either. Come to
think of it, I also don't think of a business card as a "card". A true
generic "card" is one of the following: (a) an element of a deck of
playing cards; (b) a greeting card; (c) an index card. Note that all
three of these things are significantly larger than an "ID card" or a
driver's license.

My impression is that /t/ after /n/ often disappears altogether, as
in "Clinton" /klIn n/ (how should I write syllabic /n/?) and
"antarctic" /'&nA:rdIk/. But that seems not to happen with /nd/.

Apart from some rather implausible anecdotes, I've only twice before
heard of Americans actually confusing /t/ and /d/, and in both cases
it was in a proper name that they had not met before. (One was "Ritter"
heard as "Ridder"; I've forgotten the other.) On the other hand,
writing "do" for "due" etc. is fairly common.

A preceeding vowel is supposed to be longer before /d/, but non-
Americans tend not to notice this, particularly if the vowel is
already long.

David

It doesn't "disappear" in those cases in typical AmE. Rather, the
first /n/ is realized by nasalizing the previous vowel, and the /t/ is
realized as a glottal stop before the following syllabic n. That's how
I speak, anyway. Some speakers seem not to nasalize the preceding
vowel, if my hearing is right, so that for example "Britain" and
"Brinton" would be homophones. However, it could be that the speakers
I've heard do this happened to have colds at the time.

I sometimes will articulate the /n/ and /t/ and /n/ carefully in these
cases, so for example saying [klIn t@n] instead of the more natural
[klI~?n-].

Syllabic n is [n-] in ASCII IPA. It shouldn't be written between
slashes (I think Bob Cunningham will agree with that).

"Antarctic" is a special case, which I think may be rooted in the older
form "artic" for "arctic" (right?). The silent 'c' just preserves this
old pronunciation; it doesn't represent an accent feature. Educated
speakers tend to pronounce the 'c'.

There's also "Connecticut" where the second 'c' is necessarily silent
(only British speakers and the like, like Hugh Grant, would pronounce
it). But again that's a special case, I think. Perhaps that 'c' was
silent from the git-go.

I've been in situations where I had to clarify whether I was saying /t/
or /d/ by reaspirating the /t/ or really voicing the /d/. Like "I said
'Ri-tter', not 'Ri-dder'".

Perhaps, for people who can't spell well.

I think it depends on the type of word. In something like "cot" and
"cod", the phonetic difference in AmE is really just in the length of
the vowel -- the final consonant seems to be the same (some sort of
glottal stop plus a thingie with the tongue that might not produce any
audible sound -- or something like that). I suppose though that since
length is relative there are situations where if you can't rely on
context to disambiguate, you might really mix up "cot" and "cod". I
dunno.

But the British have butchered English more than we Americans have.
Or at least, they have *altered* it more than we have, over the past
three centuries.

(I suspect this troll, John Johnson, is actually an American.
Anyone whose pseudo-e-mail-address is that obnoxious is unlikely
to be honest.) -- Mike Hardy

I assume this refers to Iceland, whose language is said to be
close to the original Scandinavian from which Danish, Norwegian, and
Swedish evolved.

It is also said to be true of the Canadian version of French.

And I have heard that some Spanish-speaking South Americans
pronounce the letters "b" and "v" differently from each other.
Is that another instance of this?

Mike Hardy

But isn't /ju/ for "long u" a more recent usage than /u/ for
"long u"? -- Mike Hardy

I've always pronounced the first syllable like "ant", with
an audible "t", and it's never occurred to me before seeing this
posting that anyone might not do that. -- Mike Hardy

At least that makes sense based on the descriptions of Old and Middle
English in David Crystal's Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language.

Anyway, I think most British people of my generation don't say [tju] or
[dju] - they use affricates, which may or may not be identical to /tS/ and
/dZ/ (for me, they're usually different).

Jonathan

<snip>

So does "Britain" get a glottal stop, not a flap?

<snip>

This British speaker doesn't pronounce the second "c" in "Connecticut", but
maybe I learnt that when I was the US. Place names often have bizarre
pronunciations all of their own - the Scottish towns of Kirkcudbright
/kVrkubrI/ and Milngavie /mIlgaI/ provide several surprising silent letters,
and apparently at least one English river (the Nene) changes its
pronunciation as you travel along it (/nEn/ to /nin/)

Jonathan

I hadn't even noticed that in [dcw's?] posting; I was focused on the
silent 'c' issue. But I can definitely hear some Americans doing that
/nt/ => /n/ thing in "antarctic". Western U.S. feature.

Yes. [brI?n-] I think. A flap pronunciation would sound extremely
strange, though I've known at least one person who used the flap in
such words instead of a glottal stop. There's also what appears to be
a North Carolinan pronunciation of "important" which uses the flap
instead of the glottal stop. See, e.g., _The Charlie Rose Show_, and
various comments on the subject by Mike Hardy.

The flap is used in "brittle", "britter".

This was me:

The stress mark was a typo, of course.

Me too, but I'm English. I was reporting how I hear some American
speakers, filtered through English ears. I pronounce the first "c"
as well.

David

To me /u/ seemed to be suggested by the occurrence of
"an university" and "an union" in 18th-century books.

I have heard (from Richard Fontana) that some British pronounce
"tune" as /tSun/, rather than /tun/ (rhymes with moon) that I've always
heard and always used. On hearing this I was inclined to think that
that is an instance of a more advanced state, in Britain, of a change
from pronouncing "mature" with a /t/ to pronouncing it with /tS/, as
nearly everyone does now (similarly with "virtue", etc.). If so, that
would be another case of language changing faster in Britain than here.
But that's just a wild conjecture on my part; I haven't looked it up
in David Crystal's book or anything like that.

Mike Hardy

That just suggests that it was thought of as a vowel - it would be entirely
consistent with [IU] (although I don't know when the change from [IU] to
[ju:] is supposed to have happened). Also, remember "an historical" and the
like. Conventions as to the use of "an" and "a" may have been different
then.

Saying [tu:n] is definitely regional (East Anglian) in Britain. I associate
[tju:n] with older speakers.

As I said before, I don't actually say /tSun/. When I pronounce /tS/
(except after /r/), the tip of the tongue rests against the lower gum, and
the sound is made by the blade of the tongue. The sounds I use for /tj/ and
/dj/ sound similar, but are made by the tongue tip. I think this makes them
"retroflex" affricates - the tongue position is similar to the one I use for
/r/ after a vowel. I don't know how widespread this is.

I don't think it's faster change, just a different change. It seems that
/tj/ can evolve to either /t/ or /tS/. Some dialects prefer one, some the
other. The dialects I'd call conservative on this issue are those that
preserve [tju] (or even retain the diphthong [IU] - maybe New York City,
based on some previous discussion of this with Richard).

I'm still hesitant to accept the claim that AmE is more conservative than
BrE. For a start it ignores the conservative features found in BrE
dialects, which can be medieval (e.g. that [u] in Scottish and Geordie
"out"). Certainly there are examples of conservative features in AmE, but I
suspect that when you consider the whole language the rate of change hasn't
been that different (onec you've worked out a way of measuring it) - it's
just been different change.

Jonathan

I think that exists in some parts of Canada too. -- Mike Hardy

The familiar Canadian diphthong, at any rate, is something like [@U],
but it is supposed to be an archaism, yes -- apparently it was once
more prevalent in US dialects (it can still be heard in some coastal
Southern accents, in Virginia for example, FWIU). I wouldn't be
surprised if [u] is used in some more peripheral parts of Canada, given
the strong Scottish influence in some places.

Then there's the diphthong used by some in your native Minnesota,
which seems to be something like [VU] or [AU]. It features a pretty
far back vowel for the first element of the diphthong -- by contrast,
accents like PPS have a very fronted low vowel for the first part of
/aU/; in PPS it's basically like the "cat" vowel. I happened to catch
a minute of NPR's _Car Talk_ yesterday during which there was a caller
from northern Minnesota who had this feature. The funny thing was, she
was talking as if she had no accent and had to put on a _Fargo_ accent
to make her friends from other regions happy. Har!

But /tSun/ comes from /tjun/, not from /tun/, and similarly with "mature"
and "virtue". I _think_ I pronounce all these with [tju:], as in
traditional RP, but they may well come out as something like [tSu:].

David

>> To me /u/ seemed to be suggested by the occurrence of

Shakespeare also has "an eunuch", and I can well imagine "such an one",
though I'm not certain I've seen it. I have no idea whether this reflects
changes in pronunciation or mis-application of the "an"-before-a-vowel
rule.

David