The "How Do You Pronounce X" Thread

[Richard W]

As in 'chicken Kiev' - /ki:ef/. Apart from the final /f/, it's the old local pronunciation. Anglophone attempts at 'Kyiv' come out wrong, riming with 'sleeve'.

[jal]

What about "Meuse" (the river). Interested in non-English responses too.

/ma:s/ :)


JAL

[Travis B.]

Does anyone else's varieties have phonologically odd pronunciations of already and all right with /l/ elision which allow normally phonologically disallowed vowel-consonant sequences?

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Does anyone else's varieties have phonologically odd pronunciations of already and all right with /l/ elision which allow normally phonologically disallowed vowel-consonant sequences?

I hear this sometimes in other people with all right, often written in eye-dialect something like a'ight, not so much with already.

[Linguoboy]

Does anyone else's varieties have phonologically odd pronunciations of already and all right with /l/ elision which allow normally phonologically disallowed vowel-consonant sequences?

I hear this sometimes in other people with all right, often written in eye-dialect something like a'ight, not so much with already.

I associate a'ight strongly with AAVE. I don't have it in my idiolect, only awright (and awready). But elision of /l/ after /ɑ/ isn't unusual for me; it frequently occurs even in all in connected speech. (In fact, this may well be my default pronunciation.)

[Travis B.]

Does anyone else's varieties have phonologically odd pronunciations of already and all right with /l/ elision which allow normally phonologically disallowed vowel-consonant sequences?

I hear this sometimes in other people with all right, often written in eye-dialect something like a'ight, not so much with already.

I associate a'ight strongly with AAVE. I don't have it in my idiolect, only awright (and awready). But elision of /l/ after /ɑ/ isn't unusual for me; it frequently occurs even in all in connected speech. (In fact, this may well be my default pronunciation.)

Is your "awr" in awright and awready homophonous with NORTH/FORCE, or is the vowel lower or less rounded than in NORTH/FORCE?

[anteallach]

As in 'chicken Kiev' - /ki:ef/. Apart from the final /f/, it's the old local pronunciation. Anglophone attempts at 'Kyiv' come out wrong, riming with 'sleeve'.

I find the /kiːv/ take on Kyiv a bit weird, which was partly why I was asking. I've been tending to say /ˈkiːɪv/, basically the traditional English pronunciation of Kiev but with the second vowel changed to KIT (and /v/ rather than /f/, but I think I already had that in Kiev, which is slightly surprising as I generally have /f/ in -ev and -ov Russian names).

[LingEarth]

Does anyone else's varieties have phonologically odd pronunciations of already and all right with /l/ elision which allow normally phonologically disallowed vowel-consonant sequences?

/ɔ.ˈɹɛ.di/ and /ɔ.ˈɹait/, yes, with the /ɔ/ definitely different from the rhotacized version in NORTH/FORCE. It wouldn't normally occur within a single word like that, but it can occur across word boundaries, e.g. in "saw red".

[Space60]

I hear this sometimes in other people with all right, often written in eye-dialect something like a'ight, not so much with already.

I associate a'ight strongly with AAVE. I don't have it in my idiolect, only awright (and awready). But elision of /l/ after /ɑ/ isn't unusual for me; it frequently occurs even in all in connected speech. (In fact, this may well be my default pronunciation.)

Is your "awr" in awright and awready homophonous with NORTH/FORCE, or is the vowel lower or less rounded than in NORTH/FORCE?

I have the low back merger and so the vowel I use in "alright" and "already" is very different from NORTH/FORCE. And no, I don't have /l/ elision in either.

[Travis B.]

The dialect here can have any of [ɒːʁˤ], [aːʁˤ], [ɔːʁˤ] (i.e. NORTH/FORCE), or [ɑːʁˤ] (i.e. START) in already and all right depending on the speaker and free variation outside of markedly careful speech. I personally tend towards [ɒːʁˤ] or [aːʁˤ], and do not have [ɔːʁˤ], or [ɑːʁˤ], but I hear people such as my mother who sometimes has the latter two in addition the former two.

[Travis B.]

Does anyone else's varieties have phonologically odd pronunciations of already and all right with /l/ elision which allow normally phonologically disallowed vowel-consonant sequences?

I hear this sometimes in other people with all right, often written in eye-dialect something like a'ight, not so much with already.

I associate a'ight strongly with AAVE. I don't have it in my idiolect, only awright (and awready). But elision of /l/ after /ɑ/ isn't unusual for me; it frequently occurs even in all in connected speech. (In fact, this may well be my default pronunciation.)

I don't recall actually hearing a'ight in the wild, but I honestly don't have much contact with real undiluted AAVE rather than intermediate varieties (aside from when I worked in Black neighborhood in Milwaukee and would go down to the local Walgreens, and I knew it was real AAVE because I couldn't understand what I overheard customers speak there).

It is interesting, though, that you have general /l/ elision after /ɑ/ and not just in the common cases of already and all right. I am used to the diphthongs resulting from /l/-vocalization staying distinct from their preceding vowels, even though I would not be surprised if this were unstable and this complex system of diphthongs would collapse within a couple generations. /aɪl/ and /aʊl/ often collapse to [aɤ̯] and [ɑɤ̯] already here.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I hear this sometimes in other people with all right, often written in eye-dialect something like a'ight, not so much with already.

I associate a'ight strongly with AAVE. I don't have it in my idiolect, only awright (and awready). But elision of /l/ after /ɑ/ isn't unusual for me; it frequently occurs even in all in connected speech. (In fact, this may well be my default pronunciation.)

I don't recall actually hearing a'ight in the wild, but I honestly don't have much contact with real undiluted AAVE rather than intermediate varieties (aside from when I worked in Black neighborhood in Milwaukee and would go down to the local Walgreens, and I knew it was real AAVE because I couldn't understand what I overheard customers speak there).

I once fairly frequently encountered it in younger Southeastern speakers in varieties influenced by AAVE, which I think the local variety here has been to an extent (though I didn't personally pick up on those features, having been told they were "incorrect").

[Travis B.]

I once fairly frequently encountered it in younger Southeastern speakers in varieties influenced by AAVE, which I think the local variety here has been to an extent (though I didn't personally pick up on those features, having been told they were "incorrect").

It is interesting what people decide is "incorrect", since I have never heard of anything in the dialect here described as "incorrect", including features which are markedly non-standard (e.g. weak past participles ending in <-ought> being turned into hybridized strong ones by tacking on an <-en> afterwards, as in boughten); I highly suspect it has to do with social class and like myself.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I once fairly frequently encountered it in younger Southeastern speakers in varieties influenced by AAVE, which I think the local variety here has been to an extent (though I didn't personally pick up on those features, having been told they were "incorrect").

It is interesting what people decide is "incorrect", since I have never heard of anything in the dialect here described as "incorrect", including features which are markedly non-standard (e.g. weak past participles ending in <-ought> being turned into hybridized strong ones by tacking on an <-en> afterwards, as in boughten); I highly suspect it has to do with social class and like myself.

Yes, I expect there was some classism involved, and also simply a general idea that children ought to be brought up speaking "properly".

[Travis B.]

Yes, I expect there was some classism involved, and also simply a general idea that children ought to be brought up speaking "properly".

I have never heard the idea that children ought to be brought up speaking "properly" here, even though I most definitely heard this as being the case in many other places. I suspect many people here are not even aware of not speaking Standard English in the first place, so there is no reason on their part to tell children speak "properly" in the first place.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Yes, I expect there was some classism involved, and also simply a general idea that children ought to be brought up speaking "properly".

I have never heard the idea that children ought to be brought up speaking "properly" here, even though I most definitely heard this as being the case in many other places. I suspect many people here are not even aware of not speaking Standard English in the first place, so there is no reason on their part to tell children speak "properly" in the first place.

I would also guess it's probably because they perceived the local language as close enough to standard (and forms like boughten feel like they ought to exist, and could easily pass for archaisms), as opposed to that don't, y'all (both regionally frequent where I was growing up, though I never picked up the second one), and also ain't, and dangling at (I was also corrected out of using that), which carry undertones of "incorrectness" (my late grandmother objected to ain't being included in dictionaries, incidentally). From what I can remember, there was more emphasis on word choice and register than on pronunciation (the same grandmother's pronunciation was a very old-fashioned regional variety that was non-rhotic, however she spoke with very "standard" vocabulary and grammar).

[Linguoboy]

Yes, I expect there was some classism involved, and also simply a general idea that children ought to be brought up speaking "properly".

I have never heard the idea that children ought to be brought up speaking "properly" here, even though I most definitely heard this as being the case in many other places. I suspect many people here are not even aware of not speaking Standard English in the first place, so there is no reason on their part to tell children speak "properly" in the first place.

That's part of it, I'm sure. But don't overlook the racism. It's no coincidence that many of the forms most widely castigated as "improper" are strongly associated with African-American speakers (whether speaking AAVE or just varieties influenced by it). A lot of linguistic hygiene is about not sounding like "those people" (whoever "those people" are in your particular corner of the world; growing up in St Louis, "those people" were (a) urban Blacks and (b) "hoosiers" (lower class Whites with recent rural origins)).

[Travis B.]

Yes, I expect there was some classism involved, and also simply a general idea that children ought to be brought up speaking "properly".

I have never heard the idea that children ought to be brought up speaking "properly" here, even though I most definitely heard this as being the case in many other places. I suspect many people here are not even aware of not speaking Standard English in the first place, so there is no reason on their part to tell children speak "properly" in the first place.

That's part of it, I'm sure. But don't overlook the racism. It's no coincidence that many of the forms most widely castigated as "improper" are strongly associated with African-American speakers (whether speaking AAVE or just varieties influenced by it). A lot of linguistic hygiene is about not sounding like "those people" (whoever "those people" are in your particular corner of the world; growing up in St Louis, "those people" were (a) urban Blacks and (b) "hoosiers" (lower class Whites with recent rural origins)).

Oh I agree completely. While there is far less deprecation of the speech of rural White people here in Wisconsin than in some other parts of the US, AAVE has been thoroughly stomped out of the speech of Black people here in public outside of the inner city - even though I went to school with a good number of Black people who were bussed in from Milwaukee under the Chapter 220 program, they never spoke AAVE at school. This is why I had not heard real AAVE before I started working at a company whose offices happened to be smack dab in the middle of a Black neighborhood in Milwaukee.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I had also begun pondering the fairly obvious racism as the conversation continued. A lot of the forms considered incorrect in Southern American English (and consequently that I was corrected out of adopting) do overlap with AAVE, presumably because they're strongly historically linked to one-another.

[Travis B.]

I had also begun pondering the fairly obvious racism as the conversation continued. A lot of the forms considered incorrect in Southern American English (and consequently that I was corrected out of adopting) do overlap with AAVE, presumably because they're strongly historically linked to one-another.

It should be remembered that the South is also the origin of the concept of "white trash", where poor Whites were seen as little better than Blacks, i.e. classism was just as much a factor as racism in the South.