While there is and can be no single formal definition of General American, various features are considered to be part of it, including rhotic pronunciation, which maintains the coda [r] in words like pearl, car, and court. Unlike RP, General American is characterized by the merger of the vowels of words like father and bother, flapping, and the reduction of vowel contrasts before [?]. General American also generally has yod-dropping after alveolar consonants. Other phonemic mergers, including the cot-caught merger, the pin-pen merger, the Mary-marry-merry merger and the wine-whine merger, may be found optionally at least in informal and semiformal varieties; however, the most formal varieties tend to be more conservative in preserving these phonemic distinctions.I definitely display rhotic pronunciation (i.e. I pronounce my rs) and flapping (i.e. metal and medal sound very similar when I say them), and father and bother rhyme when I say them. I'm a bit iffy on the cot-caught merger--I seem to waver in whether they sound the same or not. I'm thoroughly off the fence on pin vs. pen--there's a clear distinction between them in my speech. Mary, marry, and merry all sound the same, and wine and whine tend to, too. By comparison, I have very little in common with the characteristics of Southern American English although I'm familiar with and can readily imitate many of the pronunciations/tendencies discussed within the article. With few if any exceptions, the pronunciations are things that I've heard but never really done myself. I did note one grammatical tendency that I do still use, namely: "The so called inceptive get/got to (indicating that an action is just getting started), as in the phrase "I got to talking to him and we ended up talking all night." Get to is more frequent in older SAE, and got to in newer SAE." I do think that I will still use got to on occasion. Another one that I will admit to is the use of dove as the past tense for dive. I do have to admit, though, that dived sounds absolutely atrocious to my ears. They also mention drug as the past tense for drag, and I'm sad to say that I did use that one at one time. I typically catch that one now. The same can be said for dropping the -ly off of my adverbs. In terms of Southern word usage, I have used yonder in the past, but it's not something that comes up frequently, I must admit. I do love the phrase hither, thither, and yon, though. And I must answer a positive both on the roley-poleys instead of woodlouse and crawdad instead of crawfish or crayfish. My cousin and I used to chase those in the creek, which, incidentally, I do not pronounce as crik. I do not, however, call shopping carts buggies or jitnies or trolleys. That would just be silly. I think that sums up my phonemic discoveries of the day. From there my Wikipedia search derailed into the descriptions of the Ozark Mountains where I grew up. It was interesting to see them refer to the Boston Mountains and Shepherd of the Hills country. Those are certainly terms I don't hear outside of the Ozarks. One of these days I should really take some time to recount some of my favorite parts of growing up in the Ozarks. For awhile, I was very interested in the history of the area--a situation only amplified while my mother worked at the local historical museum--and I can still tell some ghost stories and tall tales unique to the Ozarks from memory. And the Internet seems to be distinctly free of the story of Mary Calhoun. I wonder if my parents would still have the recording of that story my sister and I made when we were little...
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I allowed myself to get thoroughly distracted by Wikipedia today, and it was great fun. Somehow I managed to (eventually) make my way from Guy Fawkes to a discussion of American English at which point I decided to investigate some of what Greg has said in the past about my speech patterns, and I am pleased to report that my accent seems to fit best into the category of General American, which is frequently perceived by Americans as being "accentless". I can't say that I understand the phonetic alphabet and all of the terminology used in the article, but there are several things that I do understand.
Listening to Mannheim Steamroller just taught me something fascinating. Having learned German, I was familiar with the concept of formal and informal pronouns, and I knew that English once used you and thou for those purposes. Rather than continue using thou as the informal in English, however, speakers of the language began using you, which had, until that time, been a formal pronoun, exclusively. Presumably this was some kind of act of egalitarianism--in any case, the result is that modern English speakers tend to think of thou as stilted and formal when it is, in fact, the opposite.
Last spring as I was reading Wilhelm Tell as part of my German class, I noticed that characters were using the formal--or, more often, the informal--in odd places in the text. Run-of-the-mill commoners were speaking to royally-appointed governors in the informal even when they spoke to their friends in the formal. Though it struck me as odd--especially because the highly ranked characters never commented on the commoners' lack of respect--I didn't ever ask my professor about it.
Tonight I was playing around on Amazon in an attempt to make some kind of Christmas wishlist when I realized that a Mannheim Steamroller song entitled Herbei, O Ihr Gläubigen (O Come All Ye Faithful) was playing on my computer. Curious to see the German lyrics since I couldn't understand the choir on its own, I googled for the title and found some lyrics. As I read the side-by-side comparison of the lyrics in German and English, it occurred to me that the familiar English version's fourth verse uses the informal when referring to Jesus Christ:
which is quite likely where the English text comes from, knowing hymns scrap that, Wikipedia says that the Latin version is the original) also uses the informal. Given my limited knowledge of Catholicism, it would probably have been considered a major no-no to refer to God or Jesus in the informal during the time period when most of these sorts of hymns were written, so I wonder if using informal pronouns for God was a Protestant innovation, perhaps intended to make individuals feel closer to God. Once again, Wikipedia comes to the rescue:
Yea, Lord, we greet Thee, Born this happy morning, Jesus, to Thee be all glory giv'n! Word of the Father, Now in the flesh appearing!Although I knew that thee was informal, I'd never thought about its use in hymns and Biblical texts. The bells really went off in my head when I realized that the German version of the song (
As William Tyndale translated the Bible into English in the early 1500s, he sought to preserve the singular and plural distinctions he found in his Hebrew and Greek originals. Therefore, he consistently used thou for the singular and ye for the plural regardless of the relative status of the speaker and the addressee. By doing so, he probably saved thou from utter obscurity, and gave it an air of solemnity that sharply distinguished it from its French counterpart. Tyndale's usage was imitated in the King James Bible, and remained familiar because of that translation. #In other words, because ye/you was originally plural and thou was originally singular, God and Jesus have been translated into English in the informal since they are also singular. That explains the English, I suppose, but is German the same way for the same reason? It seems to me that, since German retains rules for informal and formal pronouns, that they might be a bit pickier about shoving Du onto God. Or maybe my professors have made a bigger deal about that distinction than anyone does in real life...
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