Date:  Wed, 6 Dec 1995 00:04:10 -0600

From:  Charles F Juengling <juen0001[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]GOLD.TC.UMN.EDU>

Subject: Re: On Wisconsin!



On Tue, 5 Dec 1995, Dennis R. Preston wrote:



> 'bIuhg.'

I've never heard this pronunciation for 'bag' here in MN. The usual

pronunciation here is [be:g] (It's a scream to hear a bunch of Minnesota

kids say the the "Pledge of Allegiance" to the [fle:g]!). When my oldest

son was in first grade, one of his spelling words was 'bag'. When the

teacher, a MN-sotan, pronounced the word, he naturally wrote <b-e-g>, which

is what he heard her say. So, his perfect score was dashed because of

dialect interference.

What's really interesting, tho, is that when my wife and I asked the

teacher about this at parent/teacher conference, the teacher could hear

no difference between her pronunciation [beg] and ours [baeg]!

Fritz Juengling

 What the hell could she be talking ab out? My fist contact with

> the Northern Cities Shift (no 'Great' in its title, by the way). I was

> double-confused, in fact, since, even after retrieving the lexical item

> 'bag,' I was aware that I was more used to 'sack' (of course) for

> grocieries and used 'bag' much more frequently for a testicles-container.

> Can we have some more stories of phonological cross-dialectal

> misunderstanding? I love 'em.

> Dennis

> <preston[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]pilot.msu.edu>

>

> >>FWIW, My wife's name is Holly and she complains that Minnesotans call her

> >>[haeli]. A bit of an exageration, but not too far off. This fronted,

> >>nasalised pronunciation seems to be age graded (with younger people

> >>seeming to have the more fronted/nasalised version) and, I believe,

> >>urban, altho I have not made enough tapes (I did a small study of this

> >>feature in the summer of '94) of ruralites to make any conclusive

> >>statement.

> >

> >Ah yes, the Great Northern Vowel Shift. I've heard Bill Labov talk about it

> >for years, but my most memorable encounter was still my first, back in the

> >early 1960's in my undergraduate days at the University of

> >RIAAAENNN-ch'ster (that's supposed to be a highish front very nasalized

> >vowel)--the university/city east of Buffalo, where I spent one puzzling but

> >ultimately enlightening hour on a blind date with a young woman from the area

> >who seemed to be talking about salads and couldn't figure out what \I/ was

> >saying, since she meant SALads, you know, as opposed to liquids...

> >

> >--Larry

>