Comments for Linguism

Comment on More on 1880s pronunciation by dw

dw — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 02:46:09 +0000

@Carol:

If you mean pronouncing /r/ as a labiodental approximant, I don’t know about the 1800s but it is pretty common now in Britain. I grew up doing it myself until I got teased about it in university and decided to change.

Comment on More on 1880s pronunciation by Carol

Carol — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 20:29:07 +0000

Was it peculiar to aristocrasy in the 1800’s to pronounce r like w? I just watched “Wives and Daughters” and have heard it in other “period” pieces.

Comment on How many words? by Russell Cross

Russell Cross — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 05:00:20 +0000

Asking how many words there are in a language is similar to asking how long is a piece of string. Or how many angels can stand on the head of a pin. And considering the number of words that appear and disappear on a daily basis, the size of the English lexicon is a moving target, seen from a distance, through out-of-focus binoculars, on a foggy day. Toss in the common practice of borrowing words from other languages and the task of finding an accurate numerical estimate of the words in any language becomes chimeric – and there’s a wonderful word to borrow

Comment on r-deletion by Jimmy Jam NR speaker

Jimmy Jam NR speaker — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 09:54:55 +0000

I can confirm that rhotic speech in England is swiftly being replaced by the average non-rhotic variety, even in the urban centres of Scotland and Ireland non-rhoticity seems to be growing.

Comment on Abergavenny, etc by Michael Lamb

Michael Lamb — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 20:40:26 +0000

BTW most of them have of course become sink ports since the sea sank.

Comment on Abergavenny, etc by Michael Lamb

Michael Lamb — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 16:58:05 +0000

I have never heard anything but sink, tho I was born and bred in one of the Cinque Ports, and even had a great-great-grandfather who was a “baron of the Sink Ports”, as the mayors were called that. I would suppose there have been sink of them pretty much from the start, and that sank ports is a typically hypercorrective Dictionary of Blunders blunder.

Comment on Abergavenny, etc by Matthew Phillips

Matthew Phillips — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 07:57:42 +0000

Having never heard anyone talk about the Cinque Ports I have always pronounced them “sank”.

Comment on Uttoxeter by John Maidment

John Maidment — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 19:19:00 +0000

Little did Wuttoc (aka Wittoc) know what consternation he would cause when he built his house upon that heath.

Comment on Wymondham (Norfolk) and Wymondley (Hertfordshire) by Michael Lamb

Michael Lamb — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 16:38:17 +0000

Wickham, Hampshire, which William of Wykeham was William of, changed to that spelling before the rot set in. So did some of the families of that name. There are plenty of other names that took that route, but I’m sure you can think of a lot more than I can. It’s a choice between rot-proofing by spelling reform or rot by spelling-pronunciation really, isn’t it?

Comment on Uttoxeter by Graham

Graham — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 21:42:37 +0000

Eric – Yes it does match the other pairs, because although “full” is FOOT, in this dialect, there is no opposition between FOOT and STRUT, so the minimal pair is still between the short undifferentiated vowel and the long vowel of “fall”.