Date:  Tue, 25 Jul 1995 13:10:58 -0400

From:  "Peter L. Patrick" <PPATRICK[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]GUVAX.ACC.GEORGETOWN.EDU>

Subject: Re: idear



Further on the responses by Bill Kretzschmar and David Carlson: you

can find good discussions and LANE maps of the post-vocalic ("work"),

final ("father") and linking ("law-r-and-order") /r/ in NEw ENgland

speech in the ADS centennial volume (Francis's article, 18-22, and

LANE Map 550 in "American Dialect Research", ed. dI[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]n[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]s Preston, I

believe), which notes the generalization that you tend to find

'law-r-an-ohdeh' East, and 'law-and-order' West, of the Connecticut,

presumably thanks to Boston's influence. I'm not sure how current this

generalization is and would be interested to know, as I use this

sometimes as a convenient teaching example. An even earlier view was

Bernard Bloch's "Postvocalic /r/ in New England Speech..." (1939),

partially reproduced with his own charts in Allen & Underwood, 1971,

'Readings in American Dialectology'.

    AS to sherbet, which I love, whenever I find it in the stores

these days it's almost invariably dubbed 'sorbet', which eliminates the

second /r/ entirely for the linguistically insecure, though it appears

to considerably raise the price of the product... (If 'sherbert' might

be influenced by 'Herbert', what about 'sorbet'? Corbet? corbeille?)

    --peter patrick