Date:  Sat, 19 Mar 1994 13:58:40 CST

From:  "Donald M. Lance" <ENGDL[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MIZZOU1.BITNET>

Subject: Re: Southern Palatal Glide in /aesh/



Re Rudy Troike's /aey/ --> /ey/ discussion, in response to David Bergdahl's

comment on special/spatial.

Evidence from one family, reported by one member of that family, is not

huge amount of data, but I wouldn't include /kaent/ [kaeInt] --> /keynt/

for 'can't' in that list. The Lance family, for the generations whose

speech I know of, say /keynt/ all the time in conversation. I learned not

to tense the vowel in formal style, but am not always successful in keeping

the monitor active while I'm, e.g., giving a lecture on dialect -- that is,

I slip into my /keynt/ phonology. My father tensed and raised the vowel in

our last name -- sometimes -- and his mother did all the time. My father's

mother was a Watkins, not a Lance, but that was her pronunciation. Some

descendents of 1750s immigrants in our line have kept the spelling 'Lentz'.

The Lance tribe does not have /E/ raising before alveopalatals, except for

ketch (which I suspect is a lexical matter rather than phonological, along with

git -- at least in 20th century form). We don't systematically have [eI] in

measure and special. My judgment of family language is no doubt colored by

my Valley Talk to some extent.

I agree fully with Rudy's comment on Dan Rather's vowel in national. Dan is

from way up the coast by Houston, from Wharton. And Lee Pederson (in vol 7

of LAGS) has a dialect boundary just south of the Bay City, El Campo, Wharton

area. Rudy and I are from one side of that line and Dan is from the other.

So Rudy and I, from a closely-related, neighboring dialect will hear things in

Dan Rather's speech that people in Illinois don't (cf. Dennis Preston's

data on Indianans' and Michiganders' placement of 9 speakers of regional

dialect along a line from Saginaw MI to Dothan AL -- reported in his

articles in HEARTLAND ENGLISH and AMERICAN DIALECT RESEARCH (U of Ala P and

J Benjamins presses, both 1993).

So what's my main point? That one shouldn't include /ae/ raising before

[nasal + vl stop] in the same general raising rule that accounts for

Bergdahl's [EI]. (N.B. The "raised" pronunciation of 'Lance' has an

excrescent [t].) Regional evidence, as well as historical evidence as well

as we can reconstruct it, probably supports my hypothesis better than

Rudy's.                   DMLance