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Germanic Lexicon Project
Message Board
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Author: William
Date: 2005-10-14 20:45:57
Subject: Re: Dialectal pronunciations
Thanks Sean.
If I may change the subject, are there any rules regarding the "correct" pronunciation of names? Especially across national lines? I've always assumed that the name-holder has the right to decide how the name should be pronounced.
William
> > Thank you, Sean. This is interesting. Do you know of any standard words
> > that have actually been created because of this practice? That is, words
> > that started out as mispronunciations, but are now accepted as the norm?
>
> Just as an aside, linguists generally don't describe language change as "starting out as mispronunciations." We don't classify language use as "good" or "bad"; we just describe things as they are. Of course, it happens often that there are usages which are measurably more common among non-prestige social groups; those are the usages which are often prescriptively described as "bad".
>
> I can't think of a case where the intrusive /r/ we were discussing has been lexicalized (made into part of the word). Roughly the reverse happened in pairs such as curse/cuss, arse/ass. "Curse" and "cuss" are the same word, historically speaking. In an r-dropping dialect, "cuss" lost the /r/; then that word was borrowed back into the standard American dialect as a separate word.
>
> --Sean