In this 26-minute video clip, linguist Henry Lee Smith (it’s a shame there’s no Wikipedia article for him) demonstrates, with the help of a panel of people from different parts of the country (I particularly liked one guy’s old-fashioned Brooklyn accent), how American speech differs geographically. I learned the phrase “light bread” for what I (and everybody I know, and everyone on the panel) call simply “bread”; does anybody still say that? And I learned there’s an any/many/penny group in which many southerners use /ɪ/ for all three — I have it only in the first two (being only half a southerner). At 2:40 Smith is a bit confusing about merry/marry/Mary — he says “because we spell these words the same way we get the idea we ought to pronounce them the same way,” and my first reaction was “they’re spelled three different ways!” until I figured out that he meant we all spell each word the same, and don’t vary it according to how we say it. At any rate, it’s a lot of fun, if this is the kind of thing you consider fun. Thanks, Nick!
Addendum (Mar. 2024). Mark Liberman posted about Smith in 2022, providing a bunch of links and complaining that he “has no Wikipedia page, despite a notable career in science, public service, and the media.” (There still isn’t one.) In the comment thread, Sally Thomason said:
His friends called him Haxie. I recently read a letter from an older linguist who said that Haxie Smith helped support George Trager, in the sense of helping Trager have some kind of academic career. Apparently Trager was a sufficiently difficult person that, as one contemporary put it, he would’ve been thrown out of George Trager University.
because we spell these words the same way we get the idea we ought to pronounce them the same way
Haven’t watched the video yet, but that seems like a strange observation. Surely most people learn early on that not everyone speaks the same way — whether from neighbors or schoolmates with different accents or from people on TV.
Not sure if it’s exactly what he was driving at, but the thing that struck me was that the dialects aren’t all reducible to a common base with variation arising just from different realisations of the same phonemes by context, and/or mergers: the actual phonemes in particular words differ between dialects. I sort-of knew this, but it was still quite striking.
The can/can distinction was especially interesting (as was Smith’s observation that speakers who don’t make it often can’t even hear it.) And the implication that rhoticity is not exactly all-or-nothing, with some rhotic speakers having distinctly less retroflexion in Vr sequences than others.
And I learned there’s an any/many/penny group in which many southerners use /ɪ/ for all three — I have it only in the first two (being only half a southerner).
I do all three. Never thought about such a thing before. Now I know myself better.
Surely most people learn early on that not everyone speaks the same way — whether from neighbors or schoolmates with different accents or from people on TV.
Probably more so now than in the 1950s, when a lot of people still stayed with their original cohort and TV strove for a “standard” accent; certainly much more than before WWII.
I watched the video — very enlightening, and so decorous! One point I had difficulty with was telling the difference between the panelists who said ‘merry, marry, Mary’ all the same, and those who said two the same and the other different. I think the latter were saying ‘merry’ and ‘Mary’ the same but I wasn’t absolutely sure.
On can and can: some years ago I saw a discussion on a crossword site about a ‘meta’ puzzle (you finish the crossword and then try to solve another hidden puzzle) in which getting the answer depended on recognizing that the phrase ‘heaven can wait’ sounded like ‘seven ten eight.’ Some people got it easily while others were totally flummoxed. There ensued a long back and forth between those who said that of course the ‘can’ of ‘I can’ rhymes with ‘ten’ and those who were astonished and indignant, having never come across the idea before.
and so decorous!
Yes, they don’t do TV like that any more! (Or with pointers and blackboards either.)
It produced rather the same sort of ubi sunt melancholy in me as watching Brian McGee’s television series The Great Philosophers on YouTube.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Philosophers
Completely off-topic, but regarding not doing TV like they used to, I love this old BBC show:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoHEaSySc3o#
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnoAE-_AUEU
And they all smoke life on TV! The past is a different country, as they say, and I sometimes find it strange that I lived in that country…
I wish they had shows like that today…
@Andrej Bjelaković: The second one, near the very end, has Anthony Burgess saying he wishes he’d been the one to have the great idea to write Brave New World. I thought that was an amazing moment.
I find the video frustrating. In some cases I have to work very hard at hearing the vowel distinctions. At other times I think I hear clear differences between the way a panelist pronounces a vowel and the way Smith repeats it. If I have the time, I’m inclined to open that video up in Praat and measure me some formants.
More about Henry Lee Smith:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jlawler/aue/smith.html
I have to work very hard at hearing the vowel distinctions
No problem at all for me; but then I’m used to hearing old-style RP. (I can even speak it, if I put my mind to it.)
OK. For example, the Brooklynite, Mr. Koepke (?), saying “Yes I can” and “I want it in a can” (17:35–17:45). I can hardly tell the two apart. When I measure the formants, I get F₁/F₂ of 580/1700 and 600/1850 respectively, corrresponding, about [ɛ̠] and [ɛ]. I can barely tell the difference between the two. When Smith repeats the phrases as Koepke was supposed to have said them, he has 750/1750 and 675/2000 Hz, respectively, about [æ] and [ɛ̞]. Even allowing for different vowel normalization, he is making the vowels a lot more distinct in height (and in opposite directions!), and in frontness.
I noticed that, but I assumed he was doing it so other people could grasp the distinction.
I’m not convinced that there is a distinction, for this speaker.
I’m reminded of earlier discussions here of dialect-specific rhymes.
One I like is Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s lyrics for “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” (different from Joni Mitchell’s), which rhyme style and now.
@Y Auditorily I hear a a pretty robust difference in quality.
When I measure it in Praat, I do get somewhat different numbers compared to yours:
lax can: F1 600, F2 1647
tense can: F1 578, F2 1812
But on the whole I think an F2 difference of more than 150 Hz is definitely enough.
Also, I think these are easier to tell apart than some of the North American marry/merry/Mary distinctions I’ve been hearing (not necessarily in this clip), where I did occasionally have a hard time.
Does English phonologize such slight differences in frontness? Could such a difference be attributed to just random diferrences between two phonologically identical tokens?
I think Smith expected the two (presumably based on previous experience) to be significantly different in F1, i.e. height.
Was he trying to demonstrate that two words had different phonemes, or that the vowel had different allophones based on prosody?
“Does English phonologize such slight differences in frontness? Could such a difference be attributed to just random diferrences between two phonologically identical tokens?”
I would say yes and yes. Depending on the case.
Recasens & Espinosa 2009 write:
“Labov’s data indicate that a less than 50Hz F1 difference should render two neighbouring mid vowels non-contrastive. A more perceptually based acoustic difference is a JND (‘‘just noticeable difference”) of about 0.2 bark which amounts to about 25 Hz in the case of F1 and to about 60 Hz in the case of F2 (Boersma, 1998: 104).”
And the ’50 msec’ paper Labov and Baranowski write: “a difference of 50 Hz in F1 corresponds in perception to roughly 100 Hz in F2”.
So 25 Hz of F1 difference in addition to some 150 Hz of F2 difference seem more than enough.
Also, it occurs to me that the tense can is liable to be longer and somewhat diphthongized.
No problem at all for me; but then I’m used to hearing old-style RP. (I can even speak it, if I put my mind to it.)
Likewise, except that I don’t have to put my mind to it, as I’ve never learned to speak any other way. I can make a reasonable stab at Manchester (on the outskirts of which I lived ten years as a child) and Birmingham (where I lived 16 years before coming to France), but in both cases short sentences or single words that wouldn’t fool natives of either. Despite regarding Devon as my spiritual home I can’t do Devon to save my life.
I was very much struck by how thoroughly RP they all were. I used to see Robert Robinson regularly in the 1970s, but I wonder if he’d made an effort to yobbify his accent by then.
“light bread” for what I (and everybody I know, and everyone on the panel) call simply “bread”; does anybody still say that?
After around the 1:19:24 mark, Freddie Greene Biddle, born in Greenwood, Mississippi on 15 February 1945, recorded in 2015:
https://youtu.be/lopJH1zpMH4?t=4764
(more information on this video here: https://www.loc.gov/item/2016655420/?)
Great find! (How the hell did you do that??)
@AC-B:
It occurred to me two minutes after going to bed that “the video” that Y was referring to was obviously the Smith one, and not Robert Robertson et al (as the rest of his comment makes clear.) I was tired … Presumably Americans don’t find older RP particularly difficult, after all.
I too was struck by the RPeity of all the speakers, and in particular by the fact that it’s quite noticeably different from current RP (as spoken by my children, for example, who lack my own exotic rhoticism; even Cambridge products don’t sound like those panellists nowadays.) It reminded me rather of Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter.
Even the Queen Herself (Gawd bless ‘er) has changed her accent quite noticeably over the decades.
Robert Robinson. Begging his pardon.
One point I had difficulty with was telling the difference between the panelists who said ‘merry, marry, Mary’ all the same, and those who said two the same and the other different.
That could be because of the order. I was straining to hear if ‘merry’ and ‘Mary’ were the same, but because ‘marry’ came in between you couldn’t get a straight shot at comparing them.
very enlightening, and so decorous!
I did feel the compere talked too much…. He seemed too eager to show everything he knew.
I grew up in central Texas (pushing 71 now), and when I was a kid we often said “light bread” to distinguish it from whole wheat, which we sometimes just called “brown bread.” So yeah, people really said that in the 50s and 60s. (Of course, “greatest thing since sliced bread” was still a thing then, too.)
I can make myself say merry/marry/Mary differently, but as a practical matter I don’t unless someone pushes me. (I had a friend from Oklahoma for a while who was absolutely preklempt about us Texans saying “pen” and “pin” the same, but for the life of me I couldn’t make them sound different. As I recall, she thought we said “pan” like “pen” and “pin,” too, but I’m reasonably certain that I didn’t do that. Sort of like folks not from the south not understanding how we used “y’all,” although I think younger southerners get it “wrong,” now, too.)
At any rate, as far as I remember, my grandmother–30 years older than me–said “merry” and “marry” about the same, but she always said Mary so that I envisioned it as being spelled “May-ree.” I don’t think it occurred to me until after she died–at 102–that her name wasn’t really Nana but–you guessed it–Mary.
djw: ‘we often said “light bread” to distinguish it from whole wheat, which we sometimes just called “brown bread.”’
Ah, so “light bread” meant “white bread”. I (59) have always known it as “white bread”, and that’s how it’s marketed. I’ve never known a time when “bread” tout court was understood to mean specifically white, and it’s all the more important to be specific, in these days of white, brown, wholemeal, wholegrain and wholeseed.
I vaguely feel like I’ve heard “light bread” for “white bread” even if not used it myself, but I can’t clearly recollect who (in terms of generation, geographical origin etc) I might have heard it from. Or maybe it was just from reading character dialogue in fiction (with me again not clearly recalling the purported age and geographical origin of the characxter). In any case, the meaning (contrasting with darker bread) seemed pretty obvious and transparent in context in a way that a lot of regional lexeme variation isn’t.
How do you pronounce any/many/penny differently? (Will I have to watch the video to find out?)
My verb-can probably drifts towards ‘kin’ if I’m not paying attention, although I’d say them the same carefully – is that what they mean, or something more esoteric?
“At any rate, as far as I remember, my grandmother–30 years older than me–said “merry” and “marry” about the same, but she always said Mary so that I envisioned it as being spelled “May-ree.” I don’t think it occurred to me until after she died–at 102–that her name wasn’t really Nana but–you guessed it–Mary.”
I can sort-of relate to that. My maternal grandmother was always just “Granny”! My maternal grandfather had died long before I was born (but, strangely, I never thought about the fact that there was no man about the house) and it wasn’t until I started doing family history thirty years after she had died that her name was actually Ann!
How do you pronounce any/many/penny differently?
I say /ˈɪni/, /ˈmɪni/, /ˈpɛni/; most southerners use (or used) /ɪ/ for all three.
And if you weren’t half a southerner, you would use /ɛ/ for all three? I thought this was about a different vowel in each, which boggled my mind!
As an American who pronounces any/many/penny all with the e of pet (/ˈɛni/, /ˈmɛni/, /ˈpɛni/), but who lives in an area with the pin-pen merger, I find it odd that some folks pronounce those words differently. That seems like a weird partial pin-pen merger.
My verb-can probably drifts towards ‘kin’ if I’m not paying attention, although I’d say them the same carefully – is that what they mean, or something more esoteric?
Smith is actually careful to put both the be-able “can” and the tin “can” in sentences where they carry full stress; the Brooklyn bloke does indeed pronounce them quite noticeably differently. I would hazard a guess that this is to do with restressing of words normally occurring with low stress, which happens here and there in English. I have some vague recollection that the process has been invoked to explain the various developments of the personal pronouns in the Germanic languages. David M will know …
And if you weren’t half a southerner, you would use /ɛ/ for all three?
Yes.
I learned the phrase “light bread” for what I (and everybody I know, and everyone on the panel) call simply “bread”; does anybody still say that?
I learned it from viral videos of public access tv shows. It was in use at least as of the late aughts:
https://youtu.be/dYqM9-Fj0Pg
0:42, uploaded 2009
https://youtu.be/NnoBzQuXuUk
3:42, uploaded 2008
Thanks!
There are those in Ireland (perhaps elsewhere) who say /æni/. This is a puzzler for believers in conservative spelling reform. Any cannot be left alone, because according to the usual English spelling rules it would rhyme with zany, so are we to write enny, inny, or anni? Enny reflects the majority pronunciation, so it’s probably the best choice. (The same holds for menny, of course.)
John C., what do you think of the two pronunciations of can? Do you distinguish them in your pronunciation?
When I was young I was completely unsplit; nowadays I have /æ/-tensing before nasals, but not consistently. So there is no phonemic distinction, and much of the time there is no phonetic distinction either. “We eat all we can, and what we can’t we can” (BrE “put up in tins”) has plain [æ] for the first and third cases, and a bit of glide, roughly [æə̯], for the second. This is probably because it’s easier for listeners to make the critical distinction between can and can’t (with unreleased or glottal stop) if the vowels aren’t quite the same.
Or at least that’s what I think I do. I really need a sociolinguist following me about with an audio recorder to be sure.
Yes. Germanic (all three branches independently to some extent) turned unstressed *e into *i, producing a doublet of stressed *ek and unstressed *ik; North Germanic generalized the former, West Germanic the latter, and in Gothic the evidence is erased because the merger was extended to stressed positions anyway.
This neat picture is complicated by the pretty widely attested form *ika. I’m not sure if *eka is attested.
PIE appears to have distinguished plain *(h₁)égʲoh₂ and emphasized *(h₁)égʲh₂om. I don’t know which one would have given the *-a in Germanic.
I don’t know if I have any particular word for putting things in tins – I don’t think it’s really something that’s done at a hobby level here – but I would have said that ‘put up’ in that sense of ‘store away'(?) was American 😀
(The OED now tells me that canning is done by putting things in jars, just to add to my bafflement!)
I wanted to mention, but forgot, that thou is restressed: vowel lengthening in stressed monosyllabic vowel-final words. And so is du, but later.
In Australia you talk of ‘canning’ fruit. There was actually a pineapple cannery in Brisbane.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canning
But see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_canning
I wanted to mention, but forgot, that thou is restressed
How do we know? Couldn’t it simply be from the stressed pronoun?
Iirc, the traditional opinion was that the /u/ in the second person singular pronoun was short in PIE and the forms with long /u:/ due to stress lengthening. But based on discussions and articles I read recently, now the communist opinio seems to be that PIE actually had *tuH2, and that the variants with short vowels are due to shortening.
Thanks!
How the hell did you do that??
YouGlish is a search engine for captions on YouTube:
https://youglish.com/pronounce/%22light%20bread%22/english?
I recommend it to my students who are learning English — it helps them find interesting videos to watch for working on pronunciation, aural comprehension, and specific vocabulary groups. It will search videos in several other languages as well — I use it myself to try to get Korean phonology into my head:
https://fr.youglish.com/pronounce/%EA%B9%BB%EC%9E%8E/korean?
Wow, that’s an amazing resource.
English “I” is particularly odd, having got restressed, with vowel lengthening, and then unstressed again.
That remarkable man Joseph Wright, in his grammar of his native Windhill Yorkshire dialect, describes two distinct unstressed forms of the 1sg pronoun with different syntactic uses:
ast ə dunt if id kud
“I should have done it if I had been able.”
(This is actually taken from his Gothic grammar, but you get the idea.)
That’s ad ə dunt if id kud, at least according to p. 148. (Note that he adds “never kəd” — he doesn’t want you to get any wrong notions.)
I kept being distracted thinking surely that woman’s name is Gwaltney, not Gawaltney. Does Smith have trouble pronouncing initial /gw/?
Oops, sorry, I misremembered; yes, it could be directly from the original stressed version.
I’m not aware of any evidence for *h₂, though, other than the vowel length itself.
the communist opinio seems to be that PIE actually had *tuH2
I’m reasonably sure that Bob Avakian has no strong views on the subject.
(yes, yes, spelling correcters suck)
I was also struck by Smith’s 3-syllable pronunciation of the first panelist’s name. Would he have checked on the pronunciation of the names before recording?
Miss Gwaltney would have had a very prominent name in her home town of Smithfield, Virginia, also the home of Gwaltney Foods, producers of bacon, hot dogs and the like.
Good rendition of the Tidewater pronunciation of ‘about the house.’
I’ve known one Virginian named Gwaltney; he pronounced it with two syllables. But it’s hard to find a non-name noun in English beginning with /gw/.
Guano.
The equivalent is well attested up here in the Nordics, though at least in Finnish it means ‘non-rye bread’ rather than specifically ‘white wheat bread’.
Re “can”: All this has happened before; all this will happen again.
http://languagehat.com/that-strange-muffled-utterance/#comment-2882705
So, in 1920’s Missouri, how does this rhyme?
By which I mean, I assume that dawn and gone rhymed, but I want to know what the pronounciations were that made them rhyme.
They rhyme for me; they both end in /ɔːn/.
Hmm, I’m sure I was taught a short vowel in gone. And even if I lengthen that vowel, it’s closer than that of dawn. And here I thought I’d been americanized beyond remediation. I blame my teachers.
Are there speakers for whom dawn and gone *don’t* rhyme (ETA: other than Lars, who may have a good excuse)? Maybe those for whom CLOTH and THOUGHT aren’t merged? (Since they’re merged for me and most-if-not-all American speakers, I don’t have very good intuitions about which of those words are sorted into which set absent the merger.)
Of course, Am-Eng speakers with the cot-caught (a/k/a LOT-THOUGHT) merger vary as to what vowel they use for the words in that merged set, but I don’t have the merger and my unmerged pronunciation of CLOTH/THOUGHT words accords with hat’s.
I’m quite sure I’ve heard a short [ɔ] in “gone” from native speakers. In When I’m dead and gone”, it rhymes with “on”. But maybe thats purely rightpondian?
Are there speakers for whom dawn and gone *don’t* rhyme
Sure. Brits. (The /gɔ:n/ pronunciation, rhyming with “dawn” used to be RP, but is now regarded as weird by even extremely posh RP speakers.) The /gɔ:n/ version does turn up in dialects though: notably, in stereotypical Cockney.
Caribou nibbling the croquet hoops …
Bernard Shaw (no less) had /ɔ:fn̩/ for “often”, (homophonous for very-old-fashioned RP speakers with “orphan”) which is of a similar vintage and markedness. I seem to be one of the few left who doesn’t have a /t/ in this word. I blame violent video games.
Quoth WP:
Maybe this is where the film broke; I do have a long vowel in on, and it does indeed rhyme with dawn (more or less), but I never picked that up for gone.
And maybe that’s why I’ve seen gawn as eye dialect for gone, but never (say) dawn for done (which can be dun instead).
Or what the esteemed gentlebeing from Alpha Centauri said. And I do have /ɔ:fn̩/, blaming aliens.
Anyway, it’s for the choir, so vowel lengths follow what the composer wanted.
(On that topic: It’s extremely difficult to keep a Danish choir on the straight and narrow as regards the five, count them, five, not 25, vowels of ecclesiastical Latin. semper is a particular pain point. Especially when the composer was a bastard and put the word on two breves).
Ah, so “gone” is in fact CLOTH while “dawn” is in fact THOUGHT, for those for whom those keywords have distinct vowels? Everyone agrees that CLOTH and THOUGHT are merged in “General American” pronunciation (with variation in whether that merger is or isn’t a subpart of a yet-broader merger) and I can’t say I’m aware of an American dialect in which they aren’t, but maybe I’m overlooking something.
/ɔ:fn̩/ for “often”, (homophonous for very-old-fashioned RP speakers with “orphan”)
unavoidable.
though maybe worth mentioning that in many versions of the song “The Orphan Boy”, the major general’s pronounciation is exaggeratedly rhotic to underline the lie. in the 1980/83 kline/ronstadt production in new york, it’s pretty deep in what i think is intended to be scottish/newfoundlandish territory (“an arfan b’y”), but could now be seen as anticipating the biden/kinnock plagiarism scandal of a few years later.
I don’t think there is any dVn with V = CLOTH
done is STRUT, don is LOT, dawn is THOUGHT; dan “black belt” can be TRAP or PALM; darn is START. Apparently dorn is an old name for “thornback” and thus presumably NORTH rather than FORCE.
From the spelling, though, it looks like gone and done might have rhymed back in the day. But it’s always possible that the spellings arose in different dialects and there was no single variety where they rhymed. (I think bury is the poster child for that kind of thing: It never rhymed with fury [say] for any speaker of the standard language / central dialect).
Sir Thomas Wyatt:
done rhymes with moan.
gone and one rhyme with moan.
alone rhymes with moan.
(Dude’s sonnets moan a lot.)
Re “I don’t think there is any dVn with V = CLOTH,” my initial response is “Of course there is: dawn.” Put another way, I don’t identify the vowel resulting from my CLOTH-THOUGHT merger as the THOUGHT vowel but not the CLOTH vowel. The /ɒ/ that certain folks across the ocean reportedly have as their CLOTH vowel (and maybe their LOT vowel to boot) isn’t my CLOTH vowel and it isn’t any vowel at all in my dialect.
I seem to be one of the few left who doesn’t have a /t/ in this word.[ /ɔ:fn̩/ for “often”]
Few? Count me amongst them — have I been away from Blighty so long the pronunciation has changed?
I’ll put a marked /t/ in if I’m speaking carefully and slowly, but not in usual speed connected speech.
I never have /t/, no matter how deliberately and slowly I’m speaking. Its absence is not an allegro phenomenon for me.
My parents are the same, but even my younger sister says /ɔftn̩/.
The form with /t/ is actually a spelling pronunciation historically: the stop was regularly lost in this context earlier, as in soften, listen, fasten etc.
I recall reading that Elizabeth I actually wrote the word offen. (Though I don’t expect that criticising her spelling was a healthy activity.)
I never have /t/, no matter how deliberately and slowly I’m speaking.
Same here. The form with /t/ always strikes my ear unpleasantly, even though I know it’s common and perfectly OK.
That’s how I was taught it – by a teacher who readily conceded that if I was had become common enough in the wild that it couldn’t be simply classified as a mistake anymore.
Colleagues my age at Oxbridge do say “off, ten”. They don’t even drop the unstressed vowel.
Good Queen Bess did use lots of sane spellings, e.g. dides for “deeds”.