Date: Mon, 24 Nov 1997 15:44:04 -0500

From: Pat Courts courts[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]AIT.FREDONIA.EDU

Subject: Re: "wh"



Mark, your story about "huwa" for whore reminded me of an incident that

occurred many years abo when I was stil at Michigan sTate U. Wandering

through the building in which the ESL classes were held, I heard this

chorus of students repeating, "woont, woont, woont" (dobl "oo" sounding

like the "o" in "do." I peeked int o see that a friend of mine was teachng

the class, so later on I asked what the hell he was doing with this "woont"

stuff. Well (or was it "why"), says he, "I was trying to teach them how to

pronounce "woont," you know, like in "I woont (won't) do it." I am from

Chicago and therefore speak Standard English--I, of course, corrected him

immediately. Unfortunately, he thought I spoke strangely too.

At 02:42 PM 11/24/97 -0500, Mark Mandel wrote:

I'll always remember in the mid 60s seeing a graffito in NYC, around

104th St. and Broadway:



YOUR MOTHER IS A HUWA



That puzzled me for a very long time, till I finally "heard" it mentally with

the appropriate accent and intonation to match something I had actually

heard.



Mark A. Mandel : Senior Linguist : mark[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]dragonsys.com

Dragon Systems, Inc. : speech recognition : +1 617 965-5200

320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02160, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com/

Personal home page: http://world.std.com/~mam/





Cheers,



Pat Courts