[HPforGrownups] OT--dialects, was pronunciation

[Amanda Lewanski]

No: HPFGUIDX 9043

Simon Biber wrote:

> Forks and Fawkes are homophones, at least in my dialect (Australian). Would
> you pronounce them differently?

I did a dialect study of east Texas for my honors paper in English, because
dialect maps persistently place it in the Southern dialect, which is r-less
(meaning the /r/ is dropped when it occurs in certain placements, like a
British or Australian person [which, by the way, most Texans cannot distinguish
betwixt]). No part of Texas is r-less, at least anymore--the Southern dialect
is shrinking. But my grandmother was from east Texas, and *was* r-less, and I
remember as a child begging her to say such things as "sugar" and "pepper" and
"butter" because it sounded like /shugah/ and /peppah/ and /buttah/, which was
endlessly amusing to us. She would have found "forks" and "fawkes" to be
homophones, as well.

The voiced /r/ sounds a lot like the "rrrrrr" noise you make when you're
pretending to growl, hunting your kids. [I'm sure you can actually produce the
noise, unlike the Irish with /th/, but I can't find you an example, sorry--I
cannot, sitting here with no books in front of me, think of a word with the
appropriate phoneme in the Australian dialect.] The /o/ in "forks" is much
closer to a long /o/ than the "aw" in Fawkes, which is more the /ah/ of
enlightenment, deepened a bit by the /w/--very much like the "awww" in response
to a cute kid or puppy or such. Suffice it to say that in the American Midland
dialect, which most of us speak some variant of, the two words do sound very
different.

Amanda, damn proud of her "y'all" and "fixin' to," thank you very much