Way back in 2013 I told the world about my discovery of a lost masterpiece, Alexander Veltman’s Странник [The Wanderer], and last year I posted about Stephen Bruce’s forthcoming translation, originally inspired by that post. Now it has come forth and the never-to-be-sufficiently-praised Northwestern University Press has sent me a copy, and it is every bit as good as I hoped and expected, from the gorgeous cover (featuring Karl Bryullov’s Portrait of V. A. Perovsky on Column Capitals) to the fifty pages of detailed end notes. Reading through it, I quickly gave up comparing it with the Russian (Bruce’s translation is thoroughly reliable) and simply enjoyed the ride; the fact is, I didn’t feel any great loss, because Veltman is not a stylist like Bunin or Nabokov (though his prose is thoroughly enjoyable), he is a raconteur, and his rambling storytelling can be enjoyed in any language. As a matter of fact (and I feel bad about even saying this — sorry, Alexandr Fomich!), I actually enjoy the many poems more in translation; in Russian they annoy me slightly by their tossed-off salon-verse style, but Bruce has made them sound fluent and charming in English, with natural-sounding rhyme and meter, which must have taken a lot of work to pull off.
And reading it consecutively in my native language, without stopping to look things up or figure out a complicated Russian construction, I find myself enjoying it in a different way, and making what feels like an important discovery: the ground theme of the novel is freedom. He starts by saying that with determination and imagination “we shall be everywhere and learn everything,” and in the context of the Russian Empire, where nobody was allowed to go anywhere the autocracy didn’t want them to go (Pushkin’s Journey to Arzrum, which came out around the same time, in the early 1830s, is about this), that was a daring idea. He says that using the flying carpet of imagination we can go anywhere we want, and no one can stop us. I suspect it’s only his jolly style and his neverending divagations into inoffensive topics like wine, women, and song that kept him out of trouble. In any event, it’s a charming and invigorating read, not like anything else in Russian literature, and I am pleased as punch that it has made its appearance in English; I devoutly hope it is just the start of a series of Veltman translations. If it is, Veltman is in good hands with Bruce and NUP, and I hope I can report on future volumes. If you want to be an early adopter and help promote the Veltmanic future, you can order it at the publisher’s page (hint: Christmas is just around the corner), and a little bird tells me that if you enter the code WANDERER at checkout you get 30% off through the end of February.
I can’t resist quoting the start of the acknowledgments:
This translation began over a decade ago as a hobby, a welcome distraction from the rigors of graduate school, rather than a project with a clear path to publication. I owe my initial discovery of Veltman and The Wanderer to Stephen Dodson, whose blog Language Hat introduced me to this fascinating work. His continued interest, along with insightful suggestions from his readers, has helped clarify some of the book’s more obscure references.
So you, the Varied Reader, have gotten your due as well!
This is very good news! I remember thinking at the time that you had made a real discovery with Vel’tman.
So great to see these works being made more accessible.
Yes indeed!
Behold the mighty influence of Hat, which bestrides the narrow world like a Colossus, from Petrograd to Evanston!
Separately, I was puzzled by Veltman’s patronymic, and learning that his father was named “Foma” didn’t initially help until I was able to figure out that Фома (with or without another letter on the end) = “T[h]oma[s].” St./Sv. Фома doesn’t seem to have been a particularly popular one to name Russian boys after. But now I’m wondering if this is an anachronistic retrojection of Communist spelling reform and his father would have spelled his name (and the son’s patronymic) with a Ѳ instead of Ф back in the day. I see that the Cyrillic-using South Slavs all seem to go with Тома for the saint, which is easier for my eyes to figure out.
The spelling reform is bourgeois, not communist. The February revolutionaries just didn’t have the time or means to implement it, mostly.
But yes, Ѳ, sure.
“Foma” as an inappropriate alias for Jason Bourne: https://languagehat.com/badly-invented-names/
(It’s irrelevant that every time I see that name [edit: viz., “Foma”], I think of Cat’s Cradle.)
Nothing unusual about Ѳома/Фома. In the same vein, Dostoyevsky, whose name was Ѳёдоръ (< Theodor(e)), became Фёдор in post-1918 spelling.
I thought Dostoevsky’s name was originally spelled Ѳeoдоръ.
Congratulations, Hat, on what your blog posts led to!
I actually enjoy the many poems more in translation; in Russian they annoy me slightly by their tossed-off salon-verse style, but Bruce has made them sound fluent and charming in English, with natural-sounding rhyme and meter, which must have taken a lot of work to pull off.
John Frederick Nims said that rhymed translations could take him a hundred times as long as unrhymed—and he seldom achieved “natural-sounding”. I won’t argue with the number. An advantage of tossed-off salon verse is you don’t wonder whether you’re desecrating a masterpiece, but still, if 1% of The Wanderer is verse, it might have taken Bruce as much time as the prose.
It’s a lot more than 1% (though I’m not going to take the trouble to figure out the figure), and yes, I’m sure it took him as much time as the prose.
@Rodger C
I don’t know about originally, but here is someone writing it as Ѳедоръ/Ѳёдоръ in 1892.
I mean, Ѳёдоръ and Ѳeoдоръ are two forms of the same name, one nativized and the other Full Church Slavic, so it’s not as like you have to pick one or the other and stick with it forever.
I meant that I somehow thought Dostoevsky wrote it Ѳeoдоръ, but now I’m thinking that I may have been misled by the English spelling “Feodor.”
Thank you all for the kind words! I was truly grateful for everyone’s input in the April 2024 post.
@Jerry Friedman: I suspect the verse may have taken even longer than the prose, given how many versions I drafted. I started with literal, academic translations, but they fell flat (I won’t torture anyone with my early versions), so using rhyme and meter seemed worth the trouble.
Some of the poems turned out better than others. I don’t have any data to back this up, but English seems to be one of the hardest European languages to rhyme in. I would be easier to translate rhymed English poetry into Russian, though I’m not about to attempt that.
If anyone has other Russian or French classics they’d like to see translated, I’d be glad to hear suggestions! Literary translation is not lucrative, but it’s remarkably fulfilling.
It seems to be unusually easy in megamerged American varieties (PALM = LOT = CLOTH = THOUGHT, rabbit-abbot…), especially given their traditionally very high tolerance for ignoring final consonants in rhyming.
A quick check of Pale Fire: Nabokov rhymes God-Maud, sun-phenomenon, lawn-gone… I guess he wrote it in New England English, not British English.
I remember a Norwegian translator talking about translating sonettes (or something) from Italian. His point was that every Italian word has an inexhaustible number of available rhymes, while finding natural-sounding and fresh rhymes in Norwegian is hard, even without an Italian original to match. He managed, though.
Yeah, the problem is not that English doesn’t have rhymes, it just doesn’t have all that many (compared to a Romance language), so finding natural-sounding and fresh rhymes (to quote Trond) is hard.
I feel like I’ve occasionally heard /gɔd/ (rhyming with Maud) from AmEng speakers who didn’t seem to have the cot-caught merger, as if they’d moved that particular lexeme over to a different set than most have it in. It struck me as odd, but not so strongly as to incentivize me to more rigorous data collection in an attempt to find a pattern or explanation. The “Gawd” informal variant spelling matches better to posh BrEng pronunciation but it might be interesting to track its use historically to see if it offers any clues to variation in AmEng pronunciation.
Wiktionary shows both /nɑn/ and /nən/ as AmEng pronunciations for the last syllable of “phenomenon,” which is consistent with my sense. I suppose the STRUT vowel in “sun” rhymes well enough with schwa.
As I said a decade ago about the unreduced version: That pronunciation always makes me think of “Manamana.”
@Stephen Bruce and Hat: Yes, I think English is a hard language to rhyme in, along the lines that Trond Engen said for Norwegian. We have lots of phonemes and lots of final consonant clusters, so there are a lot of words that have no rhyme or only a few rhymes—and in an original rhymed poem, you can follow the rhyme if that works, but in a translation, if you have only a few rhymes available and none of them resemble anything in the original, you have to look for another word to end the line with, as you know.
@DM and Y: It depends on what you and your editors and readers are going to let you get away with, and how often. In a long poem with exact rhyme such as “Pale Fire”, you and they may feel that poetic license covers a few approximate rhymes, which don’t mean that you consider those rhymes exact.
There’s a formal tradition of being scrupulous (with occasional exceptions) about final consonants and an informal tradition—in blues, rock, country, and rap, for instance—of allowing codas to be similar but not the same. I think it’s less common to completely ignore the final consonants. In literary poetry since the middle of the 20th century or so, pretty much any similarity in the nucleus or coda can be called rhyme, and that probably counts as a more recent tradition for some purposes.
@Y (hijack): True, either Kinbote or the possibly non-existent Odon says New Wye is in New England (note to line 149), but Kinbote also says it’s at the latitude of Palermo (Foreword) and quotes Shade as saying that the butteflies Speyeria atlanta and S. atlantis occur there (n. 238), which puts it in the part of Appalachia in Virginia and West Virginia, where Botkin is a fairly common name. (I can’t be the first person to connect that to the mention of West Virginia in “An Evening of Russian Poetry”.) So maybe that mention of New England is supposed to be Kinbote’s or Odon’s error. Or maybe New England has different boundaries in the country whose states include Appalachia, Utana, and Idoming. Or something else.
Anyway, New England doesn’t have the LOT-THOUGHT merger—but good God, I’ve just noticed that the Pittsburgh dialect region, which extends south to northern West Virginia, does have that merger. I wonder whether it extended that far in Nabokov’s time. Could it be possible to narrow down the location of New Wye? But then again, there’s the British-style rhyme of “again” and “explain” (369 and 370), which Kinbote points out (or “lampshades“?) in a note, so I probably shouldn’t conclude too much from Shade’s approximate rhymes.
Perhaps it’s boring conventional wisdom to treat “New Wye” as a stand-in for Ithaca, N.Y., but simply saying Ithaca’s latitude doesn’t match Palermo’s (Pescara might be the closest Italian city of any size?) doesn’t debunk that view for me and I don’t think VN did butterfly-collecting trips down into W. Va. with dialect fieldwork along the way. Ithaca itself is an extreme cultural outlier because of the way in which generic-college-town culture overrides local rural/small-city culture but some have claimed that the adjacent “Southern Tier” counties that have somewhat down-on-their-heels Rust Belt places like Binghamton and Elmira are in a cultural sense groupable with Appalachia and the area is certainly groupable with Appalachia geologically. (Note the variant spelling in the name of Apalachin, N.Y., a hamlet in Tioga County that is best known for having been selected in 1957 by the nation’s leading mafiosi as an inconspicuous place for a get-together that alas got busted up by the authorities.)
@J.W.B.: New Wye isn’t simply Ithaca. In addition to Palermo, I mentioned that the ranges of those fritillaries approach or overlap around Highland County, Va., and Pendleton Country, W. Va. (Ithaca is well inside atlantis territory), whether or not Nabokov ever went there.* I also mentioned that the name Botkin shows up in that region—try searching for “Botkin Ridge” and “Botkin Hollow”. I’ll add that New Wye is at an altitude of 1500 feet (mentioned right before the “diana” and “atlantis”), higher than anything around Ithaca but maybe giving a somewhat similar climate.
I know of one specific similarity of Wordsmith College to Cornell (the hotel school, maybe unique at the time) and one less specific similarity of New Wye to Ithaca (nearby lakes). As you say, college-town culture is fairly generic. Are there others? I’ll admit that the area around New Wye is considerably more densely populated than the Pendleton and Highland Counties.
Anyway, you can see New Wye and Wordmsith as disguised versions of Ithaca and Cornell, or as fictions that were inspired by Ithaca and Cornell in some ways, no doubt among other possibilities, but I think the location in (West) Virginia has some interest to detail-loving readers of PF.
*But if Nabokov never went to West Virginia, why did he have the speaker of “An Evening of Russian Poetry” remember an extraordinary experience there? Could West Virginia have had some other significance for him?
Googling reveals some prior speculation about links to West Virginia offered in Nabakovian precincts of the web by someone named Jerry Friedman. But also (from another source) the claim that Nabakov et ux. spent the night of May 29, 1941 in West Virginia, en route to California where they spent the whole summer. That was before they were living in Ithaca, of course.
Nabokov himself spoke British English (e.g. here. Maybe someone here can be more precise about defining it.) I was thinking of another excerpt, where he says, “My New England ear is not offended by the long elegant middle ‘o’ of Nabokov as delivered in American academies. The awful ‘Na-bah-kov’ is a despicable gutterism.” That suggests to me that his sympathies were with the New England English he knew best from Ithaca, and they were transferred to the sympathetic character of John Shade.
Note FWIW that the internet account of Nabokov’s May 1941 itinerary looks like it probably got garbled.
In pertinent part, it’s (following a night in Gettysburg, Pa.):
(May 27) to Luray, Virginia (Parkhurst Inn & Cottages)
(May 28) to Bristol, Virginia (Hotel General Shelby)
(May 29) to the Smoky Mountains and Belva, West Virginia (Maple Shade Cottages)
(May 30) to Crossville, Tennessee (Cumberland Motor Court)
But (a) it would make a lot more sense to stay in Belva after Luray but before Bristol, because after Bristol would make it a weird back-tracking; and (b) when you go from Bristol south into the Smoky Mountains you’re going exactly in the opposite direction of the route toward Belva.
@Y: I should also have mentioned that Ithaca isn’t in New England, though it’s a lot closer than West Virginia is. It’s odd that Nabokov mentions his New England ear, since he had spent seven years in New England (the Boston area, with a very different accent from upstate New York) and 11 years outside it in Ithaca.
@J.W.B.: Interesting point about that night in West Virginia. You may have noticed that that previous speculation is substantively identical to what I wrote here, and may have seen more discussion of those fritillaries. Also speculation by Matt Roth that some of the inspiration for Wordsmith may have been James Madison University, since it’s in Harrisonburg, Virginia, around the right latitude.
@J.W.B. again: Hm! To add to the confusion, Dieter Zimmer’s version of the diary puts Belva in Tennessee, which would make perfect sense for people driving from Virginia through the Smokies, especially if Belva, Tennessee, ever existed.
If the order is indeed wrong and they went from Luray to Belva, W. Va., they might well have gone through the area where I think New Wye would be.
I wonder whether the Nabokovs visited Luray Caverns. Thirty or so years later, the cave was open to tourism and pretty cool, my boyhood self thought.
BTW, another connection of New Wye to Ithaca is New Y(ork). Another connection to the hills of Virginia or West Virginia is the lift Jack Grey got from Roanoke or somewhere (n. 949).
The latitude might fit, but the predecessor of JMU as of the time _Pale Fire_ was written was not yet a university either in name or in function/ethos. They didn’t even have a football team yet! A college with less than 2,000 students who were overwhelmingly female, local, and mostly being trained to be schoolteachers doesn’t seem the sort of place that would have had a crazy Russian emigre on faculty? (Much less a hotel school.) Although maybe one doesn’t get that good a feel for Wordsworth University in the book. Would one expect some sort of explicit mention if it was a “Southern” university, i.e. with explicit Jim Crow admissions policies as all public universities in Virginia still did to some extent at that time (although West Virginia’s public universities’ had started desegregating by 1955)? Or is that the sort of detail that would not have been as salient (given the book’s focus) as elevation, latitude, and lepidoptera?
I don’t remember where the discussion of JMU at NABOKV-L ended up. Certainly a student body that was overwhelmingly female doesn’t fit with bad Bob, the son of a padishah, and the other boys Kinbote remembers vividly. Shade does mention “the jasmine-belt lyncher” in a conversation with Kinbote (n. 470), but I think that the political issues of the time were indeed not particularly salient in the book.
sondheim’s “Rhyme and Its Reasons” chapter in Finishing The Hat (the first volume of his collected lyrics) has a charming, useful, and caustic consideration of flavors of rhyming in english lyrics. most importantly, he rejects “identities” (where the consonants that introduce the rhyming syllables are also the same) as, among other things, “death on wit”, illustrating his point with rewrites of dorothy parker’s quatrain on life and queen marie that use a “near-rhyme” (fantasia/roumania) and an “identity” (borders on mania/roumania) instead of the “perfect rhyme” extemporania/roumania. along the way, he comments on the varied northeastern u.s. english mergers:
Regional accents can confuse the issue. To me, a native New Yorker, “dawn” rhymes with “lawn” and “gone” with “on.” When I worked with Leonard Bernstein, who was born near Boston, he insisted, to my horror, that all four words rhymed with each other. For a musical version of “The Boston Strangler,” that might have been acceptable. For a show about New York street gangs, it was not.
The best “identity” rhymes use homophones. Like when Lou Reed rhymed “vial” with “vile.” Which to be fair sounded Obviously Wrong but he sort of got away with it by force of will.
throughout the collected lyrics, sondheim does a lot of self-criticism about his rhyming in the notes. for example (of a cut “ten thirty number” from Anyone Can Whistle): “As for the rhyming of “woman” and “human,” I have no excuse.” i wish reed had done a similar level of annotation in the lyrics collections published in his lifetime. (and that sondheim had put out annotations for his music as well as his words)
More on Wordsworth U. in New Wye, Appalachia. There’s a Prof. Hurley in the book and back when the book was written there was allegedly a Prof. Hurley on the faculty of Washington & Lee University (already called a university) in Lexington, Va. a bit under 60 miles further down the Shenandoah Valley from JMU.
This according to Prof. Hurley’s grandson, who further claims that the bit in the book about how Gradus considered but rejected traveling to the New Wye area by train also fits Lexington. I’m not entirely sure about that. But FWIW the itinerary Gradus rejected would have taken him not to New Wye but nearby “Exton.” There is no Exton, Virginia but there’s an Elkton, Virginia about 15 miles east of Harrisonburg, which has the interesting feature that back when Pale Fire was being written you could probably get directly to Elkton by train from New York City without going through Washington, D.C. (on a route via Harrisburg and Hagerstown), which fits the text.
Nabokov himself spoke British English (e.g. here. Maybe someone here can be more precise about defining it.)
There’s definitely a British layer (he did go to Cambridge, after all), but I wouldn’t call it British English tout court — it’s a transatlantic mishmosh with a heavy Russian overlay.
sondheim’s “Rhyme and Its Reasons” chapter in Finishing The Hat (the first volume of his collected lyrics) has a charming, useful, and caustic consideration of flavors of rhyming in english lyrics.
Anyone interested in such matters needs to see the wonderful Blue Moon, which has much mention of clever triple rhymes and the like (not to mention a thirteen-year-old Sondheim!).
AFAIK, Gawd is used precisely to indicate an accent that has shifted this one word from LOT to THOUGHT, possibly to escape the former’s merger with PALM. Dawg, on the other hand, I’m pretty sure just indicates a lack of the LOT-THOUGHT merger rather than being created by Gawd in His mirror image…
Speaking of LOT, Nabokov says thought with LOT early in the first video. That’s very unlike RP. So is the clipping of GOAT in the middle to yield just [o].
Unreduced again (and said, AFAIK) are rare in Britain – old-fashioned and/or exaggerated, I think.
Kipling has “Gawd” from the mouths of non-posh characters presumably not speaking RP but I now realize I really don’t know what IPA glyph is supposed to go with it. One problem, I suppose, is that RP has LOT & CLOTH merged to ɒ, but since ɒ isn’t part of the AmEng vowel inventory I actually (I just realized) have no idea what “eye dialect” spelling should be taken to indicate it.
needs to see the wonderful Blue Moon,
Wow! I had completely failed to clock that. Looks right up my street. And showing starts here over Christmas. Thank you.
What does David M. mean by “unreduced” said? Pronouncing it like /seɪd/?
Daniel Jones, in the 1914 edition of The Pronunciation of English, notes that in London* speech “ɔ [his transcription of the LOT-vowel] is often replaced by ɔː, thus want, dog StP wɔnt, dɔg often become in L wɔːnt, dɔːg.” Kipling’s spelling may be an attempt to render this phenomenon.
*Interestingly, Jones avoids the term Cockney and uses instead a simple capital L to designate popular London pronunciations.
Pardon the elementary question, but how does one look up which lexical set a word (or a part of it) belongs to? Right now all I can think of is looking up the IPA in a dictionary like Longman, and trying to go backwards, hoping that the given BrE and AmE pronunciations don’t both obscure the vowel in question with a merger.
“Gawd” is a stereotypical Cockney thing. I think it may be a deliberate distortion rather than reflecting a systematic feature of the dialect.
It turns up also in the mangled oath “Gordon Bennett”, and in the name of the Gordelpus, the superweapon which destroys the world the first time around in Olaf Stapledon’s intermittently brilliant but largely ho-hum and frequently downright embarrassing Last and First Men.
Interestingly, Jones avoids the term Cockney and uses instead a simple capital L to designate popular London pronunciations.
‘Cockney’ — even by 1914 — didn’t designate the whole of London, nor even working-class London speech, but specifically “born within earshot of the city’s Bow Bells,”.
Only a UKer who’d never been to London would think London speech is a single thing.
GBS has some fun with this in Pygmalion [1913, so contemporaneous]: he detects in Eliza’s accent that her father is a dustman brought up in Hounslow — working-class, but very definitely a long way opposite the East End.
Ah, I didn’t even know that Gawd existed in Britain…
Yes.
It’s actually a common pronunciation of THOUGHT there.
Probably you need John Wells’s dictionary…
Like when Lou Reed rhymed “vial” with “vile.”
As far as I can tell, those are exact homophones for me. But then my accent is still recognizably British even after all these years. I’m trying to learn how to talk like a Mainer, but progress is slow.
Probably you need John Wells’s dictionary
That is Longman, and it gives RP and AmE pronunciations in IPA, not lexical sets. Is there another?
@hat: thanks for recommending Blue Moon! like AntC, i’d missed it’s existence, and am very excited to watch it!
and i wish i could reciprocally recommend Broadway Revival, a 2021 time-travel novel by laura frankos in which lorenz hart is (almost convincingly) the love interest, but it’s just not very good. an excellent premise not executed well enough to justify the truly impressive research involved.
That pronunciation always makes me think of “Manamana.”
You are in good company.
The best “identity” rhymes use homophones. — the famous “War Pigs” incipit
@rozele: he rejects “identities” (where the consonants that introduce the rhyming syllables are also the same)
I’ve seen that more often called “Identical rhyme”. In French, where it was classically considered desirable, it’s called rime riche. It shows up in “Pale Fire”:
I’ll mention that for me, “lawn”, “dawn”, and “gone” rhyme but “on” does not, and no English word rhymes with consonne.
You are in good company.
Evan Kirshenbaum, who single- or almost single-handed came up with a way to use ASCII to represent IPA for English, used to say that “phenomena” reminded him of that silly song.
How to look up which lexical set a word belongs to: see if Lexical Sets for Actors is of any use. It’s organized by lexical sets rather than as a dictionary, but if you’re looking for a specific word you could use the site search.
Excellent. Thanks!
I have the usual AmEng mergers (or lack-of-splits, if you prefer) of TRAP/BATH, LOT/PALM, and CLOTH/THOUGHT (also NORTH/FORCE but RP does do), but not the cot/caught mega-merger. I certainly have no particularly good intuitive sense of how e.g. the words I pronounce with /æ/ are sorted out between TRAP and BATH – if it doesn’t happen to be a word where I’m confident I know the RP pronunciation I’d have to look it up.
There is one sometimes-useful diagnostic tool, though. LOT and CLOTH are “checked” vowels, meaning they generally can’t appear outside closed syllables ending with a consonant, while PALM and THOUGHT are free vowels that can end a syllable. So if a word I pronounce with the CLOTH/THOUGHT vowel doesn’t have a consonant after that vowel (e.g. “jaw”) it’s highly likely to be THOUGHT rather than CLOTH. It may seem odd that vowels that in my idiolect are, in fact, identical to each other seem to be subject to different phonotactic constraints, but I don’t make the rules.
Wells developed lexical sets as a tool to systematically compare and describe English accents. So Accents of English would be the book (three volumes, actually) to look for. Have you checked his blog? There is a post about lexical sets: http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.com/2010/02/lexical-sets.html .(there are also other posts mentioning lexical sets, search for them).
see if Lexical Sets for Actors is of any use
in the FORCE list I see some mistakes, and although (some) words of variable lexical set are marked with an asterisk, it does not distinguish whether the alternative set is NORTH or CURE.
Accents of English is what I “meant” (I’ve never seen the books myself).
BATH, and to my knowledge CLOTH, is triggered by following fricatives, following -nt (but not -nd!), and at least sometimes following -ns. Ant is an exception – it’s in TRAP to escape homophony with aunt.
My CLOTH class includes all the words with -ong and most of those with -og, as well as “gone”. I think you might find a lot of Americans whose only CLOTH-class -og words are “dog”, its derivatives, and “dogma”, though.
This may have come up before, but I am puzzled by the alleged existence of AmEng speakers without the cot-caught merger who have dog as “dawg” but don’t rhyme e.g. frog, hog, and log with it,* thereby leaving dog as some weird word like orange that has no obvious rhymes. It is admittedly a bit odd that the -og words seem split up between CLOTH and LOT semi-randomly (cog and jog would be good examples of ones with LOT, but there are more on both sides), but I’m not the one who did it.
*Also of course “blog,” for etymological reasons. Wiktionary has an entry for “hawg” as a pronunciation spelling parallel to “dawg” plus “blawg” as a bit of wordplay, but not for “frawg” or “lawg.”
Don’t you live in New York? I think that might be a good place to find those alleged speakers. You try could asking people about times when their lives were in danger and a frog, hog, or log was involved.
(I think I have free variation in “jog”.)
Dawn-lawn-gone-on rhymers represent! I’m not cot-caught merged, and those are all THOUGHT to me. I was delighted when I discovered that my boringly generic accent has at least one regional feature: I’m south of the “on” line!
For a relatively recent discussion of dawn-gone rhyming, see comments under Demonstration of American Dialects, 1958.
the alleged existence of AmEng speakers without the cot-caught merger who have dog as “dawg” but don’t rhyme e.g. frog, hog, and log with it
it’s me!
(i also separate “on” from the “dawn”/”dog” set)
Oh yes! Bernie Sanders has something like [u̯ɔ] in strong.
The sort of accent traditionally characteristic of “outer borough” ethnic-white New Yorkers born in 1941 (such as Bernie Sanders) has faded very dramatically in more recent times and you don’t overhear too many people on the subway talking like that anymore.
This reminds me that my mother (now aged 87) could in principle be an interesting subject for dialectological fieldwork, because she grew up way Upstate in what is now the Northern Cities Shift region but she moved away from that region before the shift had really happened. There’s some scholarship suggesting that her high school classmates who stayed put probably gradually adopted the shift as they aged, but her speech probably preserves pre-shift features of that region’s former dialect.
Aschmann’s US dialect map shows a boundary dividing the San Francisco Bay Area into two regions: the peninsula and the near-shore East Bay rhyming “on” with “Don”, and San Francisco and the inland East Bay rhyming “on” with “Dawn”. I suspect it’s an imaginary line (overfit, as the kids say these days.) I haven’t been paying attention, but I think I have heard the “Dawn” pronunciation more commonly in both SF and the East Bay over the years. Not that it means much, because most people I have known in the Bay Area grew up elsewhere.
@Y: that’s also odd because the cot-caught merger which makes Don and Dawn homophonous is usually said to be very widespread in Northern California. Of course as has been noted in various prior threads the actual vowel used by those with the merger varies. My father’s name is “Don” and I think he may get a little irked by (merged) people who pronounce it as (unmerged) “Dawn,” but if (other merged) people choose to pronounce “Dawn” as (unmerged) “Don” he has no particular stake in that.
The San Francisco Bay Area is said to be an island excluded from the cot-caught merger. My spouse grew up in the East Bay and has an accent almost identical to mine, including cot-caught distinction.
@ktschwartz: how do either of you pronounce “on”?
Both with THOUGHT, in the [ɒ]~[ɔ] area.
The area of the US where “on” doesn’t rhyme with “dawn” was mapped by linguists during Leonard Bernstein’s youth, and was about the same in the atlas by Labov et al. based on 1990s data. It follows the history of migration out of western New England and New York along the Great Lakes into Michigan and Wisconsin; the “on” line is, or is close to, the boundary between North and Midlands dialects. It’s bounded by cot-caught mergers to the east, north, and west, and by the shift of “on” into the CLOTH/THOUGHT set to the south.
Looking up some West Side Story lyrics, I see that Sondheim rhymes “San Juan” with “get on”, “drive on”, “turn on”, and “get gone”. That’s correct for New York, if I understand correctly, but it’s imperfect to me (Midlands), since my “on” and “gone” have a rounded vowel.
There was a helpful previous discussion here of on, gone, dog, frog, and strong. Lazar knows this stuff. And speaking of rhymes in songs, Lazar observed:
The maps show that I apparently grew up on the “awn” side of the “on line” but that’s not my pronunciation. I can sort of convince myself that I heard people saying it when I was growing up but unlike other local-pronunciation-variation things that I noticed at the time, it seems to have sort of slid by me without attracting my conscious attention. Based on a little quick googling, using “awn” as an eye-dialect spelling does not seem particularly common, although I don’t know how strong an inference that supports as to it not being a pronunciation people focus on as a shibboleth.
ETA: in the “helpful prior discussion” linked by ktschwarz John Cowen references the “on line” but seems to describe it contrary to other sources (in terms of which vowel is used on which side of the line). Maybe this was just a Homer-nodding moment, but it’s interesting.
You’re right, John Cowan got the “on” line backwards in his first mention of it. But in the next sentence he has it the other way around — “the Northern pattern … LOT in on” — which is right.
a Homer-nodding moment
Ku’om ditnɛ ku’omi’id.
“It’s the expert swimmer who gets drowned.”
@Hat see the wonderful Blue Moon, which has much mention of clever triple rhymes and the like …
I can only reinforce our host’s recommendation. Hawke’s performance is so intense, I wanted to pause continually to catch up with the references, and rehearse all the show tunes.
It feels intimate, like it was originally written for the (small) stage.
The biggest surprise was Qualley’s ‘cameo'[**] as Elizabeth Weiland. How close did history come to obliterating that intimacy?:
As I mentioned up-thread, and the reasons are beyond me, the movie’s been poorly advertised. It’s been on barely two weeks and will probably finish its run this week. There were three other people in the theatre. The usher said they’ve been getting low attendance for the whole run.
[**] not sure that’s the right word: it was longer than a cameo; but really the only scene in which she spoke at length. It felt absolutely true to life, girlfriend.