We upper Midwesterners - or at least I - consider the words "bury", "berry", and "Barry" to be homonyms. In an online discussion group a few years ago, a New Yorker, or it may have been the resident of a Mid-Atlantic state, or perhaps a New Englander (sorry, I don't remember exactly where she was from, except that it was east of the Appalachians and north of Chesapeake Bay) expressed amazement; she pronounces each one differently.
I was on a business call this morning in which a participant, reaching for a metaphor, referred to the price of Gala apples (and, as at least one person on the call had never heard of Gala apples I should clarify that Gala apples are a variety or cultivar of apples, just like Delicious or Macintosh). She pronounced "gala" in such a way that the first syllable sounded like the first syllable in "golly". I replied, pronouncing it the way that I think it's pronounced, with the first syllable sounding like "gay". A third person chipped in, pronouncing "Gala" in such a way that the first syllable rhymed with "pal". I guess regional variations are legit, and there is no one way to pronounce anything (although I concede the possibility that I'm just flat-out wrong, and no other literate being says "gay-la").
I also speak with many people from outside the US in my work. This morning, a colleague in India, in referring to a person whose name is Merrill, pronounced it in such a way that it sounded to me as though he was referring to "Metal" or perhaps "Medil". As I didn't know a Mr. Metal or Mr. Medil, I asked him to spell it, and another American had to interject an explanation. I felt awkward, and feared that my Indian colleague had lost face. My Indian colleagues are astonishingly multilingual, as there are something like 200 languages spoken in India, and they are justly proud of their ability to communicate with many people in many languages.
No profound point to this, except that speaking and hearing are more complicated than we think, and as the world shrinks, we need to be willing to stretch ourselves.
Language and accent are a rich source of humor. When Eileen of Seinfeld asked her Hindi doctor if the anti-rabies shots would hurt, he replied "Yes, veddy, veddy much." I find their accent rather pleasant and much easier to overcome than some Southern twang and, gee golly, some Scots.
ReplyDeleteScots used to be a separate language, and it basically still is. They can "speak posh" if they want to.
DeleteMy brother lives in rural Oklahoma. His daughter-in-law is from northern Minnesota.
ReplyDeleteNo one speaks to anyone else in that dysfunctional mess, but I envision a family reunion would sound like the Tower of Babel.
The late Tim Wilson has a hilarious delineation of Southern accents. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TBAqIHbbiL4
I received some ribbing from a coworker because I pronounce July with two syllables, rather than J'ly, as he does. He also said I say "write" funny, that it sounds more like "wraht", which I wasn't conscious of, and "crick" instead of "creek". Our Indian boss spoke a bit Britishly, saying laborat'ry and mandat'ry.
ReplyDeleteIn Philly:
Delete"Did you eat?" = "Jeet?"
"Did you?" = "Jew?"
In Philly, for "gas", you say "gas" if you're gentile, "gazz" if you're jewish. It was true as of 1977. Not sure about now.
DeleteSaturday or Sa'urdee? Creek/crick? You or youse? Gums/gooms? Column or colyoom? You can tell a Michigan hick by these words.
DeleteHahg or hawg/fahg or fawg/frahg or frawg? Normally, we like the broader ah sound. Except in cawfee, though they do say cahfee up north.
In Michigan, it's ChiCAHgo. But Chicagoans say ChiCAWgo.
Then there is the DEEtroit/DeTROIT controversy. Both are now correct.
And West Siders in the Land of Amway say rum for room, and ro-ad (two syllables) for road.
When I was growing up, in our household, which was certified dirt-road Michigan hick (sort of), we always said "melk" instead of "milk". But whether that was a Michigan thing, a kid-pronunciation thing, or somehow related to my dad's ethnic heritage, I've never figured out.
DeleteStanley - "jeet" and "jew" remind me of 5th grade humor, heard in the playground line at St. John's: "Juneau the capital of Alaska?"
DeleteJean, how about 30-50 feral hawgs?
DeleteOh, yah. It's "melk." My mother smacked us when we said it that way, though. Sometimes my brother sends me a one-word text, "melk," and I crack up.
DeleteThose feral hahgs are no laughing matter! There was a whole show on 1A about invasive species. Pythons in the back yard in Boca Raton. No thanks!
Elsewhere in the Midwest (a friend from Kansas and Sen. Chuck Grassley from Ioway), I hear JOO-lie (July) and INN-shornce (insurance). I was in Cairo (KAY-roe), Illinois, one time on a business trip, and all of those people sounded pretty Ozark-y to me.
Delete"Ioway", my grandma used to say that. So did her brother, who lived there. So it must have sort of been a localism.
DeleteOscar Hammerstein lyricized that pronunciation in State Fair:
DeleteOh, I know
All I owe
I owe Ioway,
I owe Ioway all I owe and I know why.
I am Ioway born and bred,
And on Ioway corn I'm fed,
Not to mention her barley, wheat, and rye
etc.
Here is the original, accompanied by harmonicas and what may be pan pipes (hard to tell), eventually growing into a cast of thousands, or at least dozens:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HvI8OZpEuM
Then there's "The Music Man"; "...there's nothing halfway, about the Iowa way to treat you, if they treat you, which they may not do at all."
DeleteA bit more on pronouncing state names: that big state north of California, we always pronounced OR-eh-gahn. But I was told, when doing some work for its state government, that the correct pronunciation is OR-uh-guhn.
DeleteI've also been told that the correct pronunciation of our 50th state (at least until the president discovers that many of its sons and daughters present as vaguely Pacific Islander) is "Ha-wi-yuh". Can't vouch for that one, though.
Philly still has that accent. We kind of have a funny way with vowels o and i. "Coake adds lyfe". And we put an r where there is none. "Can I have a class of worter?" We also sometimes misplace syllables in South Philadephia, where I was born, a common boys name is "Antnee".
DeleteWhen we watched "Inspector Lewis" I liked actor Kevin Whately's "Geordie" accent.
ReplyDeleteOur Indian employees use the word "prepone" as sort of the complement of "postpone". E.g. "We will prepone that meeting from 10 am to 9:30 am."
ReplyDeletePrepone, that's a new one. But if you can postpone, you should be able to prepone.
DeleteSo the lady from New York plopped down in first class next to a gentleman from the midwest. "Where are you from?" asked the lady, just to make conversation. "Iowa," said her fellow passenger. "Odd," said the lady. "In New York we call that Ohio."
ReplyDeleteReminds me of the famous New Yorker cover. https://brilliantmaps.com/new-yorkers-world/
DeleteCalvin Trillin, the New Yorker wit, once lunched with the editors of The National Catholic Reporter at the Old World in Kansas City. He went to KC for two reasons. One was, amazingly, to have lunch with us. The other was to visit Country Club Christian Church (which was three blocks from my house). Get the name? He came to KC from Pittsburgh. He was going, next, to Los Angeles. He said his editor had suggested he drop into Kansas City while he was "in the area."
DeleteWe hosted Calvin Trillin at our state library association one time. He was the second fussiest guest next to Maya Angelou. They stipulated the types of limos that were to meet them at the airport, the exact temperature of said vehicle, and no one was to speak to them on the ride to the hotel. Their presentations were great, of course, and they were gracious to members. But divas out me off.
DeleteMargaret Atwood, at another venue, wasn't real chatty, but utterly self-sufficient. She had the books for her reading in a plain old clear plastic shopping bag. I loved that little detail.
I love everything about Margaret Atwood. My she-ro.
DeleteMore from the Upper Midwest:
ReplyDeleteThat thing on the top of your house if a ruff.
That loose gravel on country roads (maybe it is all gone by now, though) is tailings.
Those deli sandwiches on long rolls are called hoagies, heroes, grinders, subs. But there's a region to the northwest of Philadelphia where they're called zeps, short for zeppelins.
ReplyDeleteIn the Scranton and Wilkes-Barre area, there was, maybe still is a technique called panking. Instead of shoveling snow, you run your car back and forth in the driveway and pank down the snow.
People in Michigan don't pank snow unless they want to build up a two or three inch base of ice in the driveway that won't melt until April. Your more feckless neighbors do this and then come to your door (usually smoking a cigarette) to see if you have a winch because they can't get enough traction to get out on their own.
DeleteUrban Dictionary:
Pank
To pat down until flat, compressed // To pack or tamp a loose type of material into a more compact mass
Origin: Northeastern Pennsylvania, or as we calls it: NEPA! (pronounced 'Knee-Pa')
"Ay, Bobby, hows about yous and me drive up de eynon ta da Arch-a-bald pothole anz pank some dirt inta it ta fill it up even"
That's it, Jean. You nailed it. As for panking, I use a snowblower. I ain't pankin' nothin'.
DeleteMelk? Pank? Ioway?
ReplyDeleteHaven't heard any of those.
Jim, my brother is named Barry, and we pronounce it the same way that you do - it sounds like bury, and berry. However, we all grew up in California, not north of the Chesapeake Bay. We have a neighbor named Barry also. He grew up in the DC area. His sibs pronounce his name the same way I pronounce my brother's name (berry, bury). His wife, from New York, pronounces it, well, like a New Yorker I suppose. The "Ba" sounds like it does in "bad" or "bath".
Until age 10, I lived in the San Fernando Valley in CA (before moving a couple of hours away, in the mountains), and, since I am old, the type of speech known as "Valley Girl" had not yet been invented. It's not really an accent, but a way of speaking, mostly characterized by what is called "up-talk". Some even call it a dialect.
https://www.theodysseyonline.com/talking-like-valley-girl
We have Valley Girls to blame for the introducing the use of the word "like" into speech in ways that had not been used until the late 20th century. . I have gotten out there often enough over the years that I became familiar with it long ago. When one of my sons joined a new soccer team here, back in the 90s, and I started conversing with the coach's wife, I realized she was not a native of the mid-Atlantic. She sounded like a Valley Girl. I asked her where she was from - Northridge - in the San Fernando Valley.
We have traveled in England a lot over the years. My husband had a number of business trips over a long period of time, and, later, we also visited it on our own many times. The accents are very different from region to region. The Brits probably also judge people more on their accents than Americans do with our regional variations. Very conscious of accents there.
I studied french as a young woman, and spent my entire junior year in France. Then I did not use French much at all for decades. We started traveling a lot with our sons once they were old enough, and have gone back to France many times. My French is very rusty, but after a number of trips to different areas at different times I realized that although I can't really detect different regional accents, I do understand the French spoken in some areas better than in others. It seems to me to be due to how fast people are speaking. Parisians speak French must faster than people in the southern and in the Med regions do. I have a far easier time understanding them than I do Parisians. Also, I have a much easier time understanding French speakers from Belgium than I do French people from Paris. A close friend from Bordeaux said that sometimes Parisians look down on her because of her accent. To me, she sounds just like all the other French speakers I overhear, but it's obviously a different accent to the French themselves.
I worked with a woman from the UK who spoke with a "received" accent at work. She wanted to know if she could take a class to acquire an American accent. Apparently it's common in the UK to eradicate your regional accent to improve job and social status. Ironic, since a Brit accent is perceived as more cultured here. I told her to leave it alone.
DeleteThe most hated accents in Britain, according to a recent poll, are Glaswegian, Cockney, Mancunian, Scouse, and Brummie in that order. Apparently a southern Irish accent now beats Received Pronunciation for loveliness.
I guess your ear for understanding accents develops by hearing lots of them. I was in North Dakota for a couple of weeks and several times people asked me to repeat myself when I spoke. I think they couldn't understand my accent. Which never happened anywhere else I ever been. I figure maybe they didn't run into a lot of people who did not speak exactly like they did.
ReplyDeleteI hated traveling in the South where everyone helpfully pointed out that I wasn't from there.
DeleteDuring my 90's business trips to the Dallas-Fort Worth Area, it sounded like almost nobody was from there. The cost of being an economic magnet, I guess. In the 70's, at a technical meeting, I heard someone speak up with a really strong Texas accent. I turned around to see what a real Marlboro man looked like and saw a very Chinese-descended gentleman.
Delete