Zompist Bboard Again

Rounin Ryuuji wrote: ↑Fri Mar 22, 2024 6:21 pm I could well imagine German [ç] and [ʃ] merging; a similar change seems to have happened at some point in Middle English.

Travis B. wrote: ↑Thu Mar 21, 2024 12:55 pm This is more an English-learners-of-German question. It seems to me that English-speakers in general have an easier time learning the ach-Laut that the ich-Laut, despite the fact that the ach-Laut is only found in certain English varieties such as Scottish English, and the ich-Laut being found natively as a phone -- but not a phoneme -- in much of NAE at least. (For instance, /h/ before /j/, /i/, and /ɪr/ is pronounced here as [ç], and indeed that is how I personally learned to pronounce the ich-Laut.) Any idea why this is so?

Linguoboy wrote: ↑Wed Apr 03, 2024 4:22 pm whereas the Ich-Laut is most common in coda position (the chief exceptions being a few recent borrowings like Chemie, China, Charisma and not for all speakers even in those cases).

Raphael wrote: ↑Sun Apr 07, 2024 3:44 pm What is the exact meaning of the word "cute" in Hiberno-English? It seems to be subtly different from its meaning in most other varieties of English, but I'm not entirely sure how.

Travis B. wrote: ↑Mon Apr 15, 2024 2:23 pm Which pronunciation of Chicago do you favor (I have been listening about "End of Beginning" by Djo, i.e. Joe Keery, on repeat today), which prominently has THOUGHT in Chicago while from hearing people from Chicago speak I generally hear it with a clear centralized or even fronted LOT (i.e. [a]). In the dialect here in the Milwaukee area THOUGHT (as [ɒ]) is favored, and I highly associate the LOT pronunciation with [a] with people native to Chicago.

Travis B. wrote: ↑Mon Apr 15, 2024 2:23 pm Which pronunciation of Chicago do you favor (I have been listening about "End of Beginning" by Djo, i.e. Joe Keery, on repeat today), which prominently has THOUGHT in Chicago while from hearing people from Chicago speak I generally hear it with a clear centralized or even fronted LOT (i.e. [a]). In the dialect here in the Milwaukee area THOUGHT (as [ɒ]) is favored, and I highly associate the LOT pronunciation with [a] with people native to Chicago.

However, apparently the THOUGHT pronunciation actually originated in Chicago itself as a reaction to the fronting of LOT and its deprecation, resulting in hypercorrection.

zompist wrote: ↑Mon Apr 15, 2024 3:54 pm I have the hypercorrected /ɔ/, which I've been told is close to [ɑ]. I'd've picked that up from my parents, who were natives of the city. What I hear outsiders saying is [a].

zompist wrote: ↑Mon Apr 15, 2024 3:54 pm These days whites are just 31% of the city, so "people native to Chicago" are probably all over the place phonetically.

zompist wrote: ↑Mon Apr 15, 2024 3:54 pm Not quite: the old lower-class Chicago accent, the one they were reacting to, was [æ]. You can hear an example at 0:12 in Yuri Rasovsky's Chicago Language Tape. Note that this is an actor's rendition, not his own dialect.

Travis B. wrote: ↑Mon Apr 15, 2024 5:28 pm

zompist wrote: ↑Mon Apr 15, 2024 3:54 pm Not quite: the old lower-class Chicago accent, the one they were reacting to, was [æ]. You can hear an example at 0:12 in Yuri Rasovsky's Chicago Language Tape. Note that this is an actor's rendition, not his own dialect.

I do not think I have ever heard the old lower-class Chicago accent, since I have never heard someone from Chicagoland with [æ] or LOT/PALM. (In contrast I have heard people from Chicagoland with markedly raised and diphthongized realizations of /æ/; e.g. I swear I have heard Hillary Clinton, a native of Chicagoland, pronounce /æ/ as [ɪə̯].)

(Personally I do not trust an actor's rendition, since it will inevitably miss key phonological points; e.g. I not infrequently notice features I had previously missed of the phonology of the dialect here, so unless one is a trained linguist doing detailed fieldwork one is liable to also miss these things, and even then it seems that not much attention is given to the details of, say, NAE dialects even by linguists.)

zompist wrote: ↑Mon Apr 15, 2024 6:02 pm Unfortunately I don't recall my source for the [æ/ɔ] split. Probably sci.lang. From googling various pages, it looks like the split is now just [a] vs. [ɔ]. But Google sucks these days and I don't see a way to get a more scholarly discussion.

The thing is, the hypercorrection theory makes no sense if the "lower class" pronunciation was in fact the standard [a] that was the original pronunciation, and is what everyone else in the country says. The backing does make sense if, in fact, the lower class pronunciation was fronted.

Travis B. wrote: ↑Mon Apr 15, 2024 2:23 pm Which pronunciation of Chicago do you favor (I have been listening about "End of Beginning" by Djo, i.e. Joe Keery, on repeat today), which prominently has THOUGHT in Chicago while from hearing people from Chicago speak I generally hear it with a clear centralized or even fronted LOT (i.e. [a]). In the dialect here in the Milwaukee area THOUGHT (as [ɒ]) is favored, and I highly associate the LOT pronunciation with [a] with people native to Chicago.

However, apparently the THOUGHT pronunciation actually originated in Chicago itself as a reaction to the fronting of LOT and its deprecation, resulting in hypercorrection. But here in southeastern Wisconsin, the pronunciation of LOT as [a] (except when adjacent to /r w h kw gw/) is not deprecated at all (and I sense far less negative views here of Milwaukee dialect than I have heard people have of Chicago dialect, to the point that I did not realize that not everyone in the US has [a] for LOT until I was an adult), so the THOUGHT pronunciation would have to be acquired through dialect borrowing from people in Chicago itself rather than being a parallel innovation here in the Milwaukee area.

So how do you pronounce Chicago and why?

Raphael wrote: ↑Tue Apr 16, 2024 6:39 am

Travis B. wrote: ↑Mon Apr 15, 2024 2:23 pm Which pronunciation of Chicago do you favor (I have been listening about "End of Beginning" by Djo, i.e. Joe Keery, on repeat today), which prominently has THOUGHT in Chicago while from hearing people from Chicago speak I generally hear it with a clear centralized or even fronted LOT (i.e. [a]). In the dialect here in the Milwaukee area THOUGHT (as [ɒ]) is favored, and I highly associate the LOT pronunciation with [a] with people native to Chicago.

However, apparently the THOUGHT pronunciation actually originated in Chicago itself as a reaction to the fronting of LOT and its deprecation, resulting in hypercorrection. But here in southeastern Wisconsin, the pronunciation of LOT as [a] (except when adjacent to /r w h kw gw/) is not deprecated at all (and I sense far less negative views here of Milwaukee dialect than I have heard people have of Chicago dialect, to the point that I did not realize that not everyone in the US has [a] for LOT until I was an adult), so the THOUGHT pronunciation would have to be acquired through dialect borrowing from people in Chicago itself rather than being a parallel innovation here in the Milwaukee area.

So how do you pronounce Chicago and why?

Which syllable, specifically, do you and the people who responded to you mean?

Travis B. wrote: ↑Tue Apr 16, 2024 10:23 amWe mean the second syllable, even though apparently there is also variation in the third syllable (i.e. whether /oʊ/ is reduced to a schwa or not).

Linguoboy wrote: ↑Tue Apr 16, 2024 11:03 am (I myself have /ah/ for the second vowel, but I'm not a native, just a longtime resident.)

Travis B. wrote: ↑Tue Apr 16, 2024 12:18 pm

Linguoboy wrote: ↑Tue Apr 16, 2024 11:03 am (I myself have /ah/ for the second vowel, but I'm not a native, just a longtime resident.)

But by /ah/ do you mean [a] or [ɑ]?