Date:    Mon, 23 Feb 1998 15:13:01 -0500
<br>From:    Mark Mandel  Mark[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]DRAGONSYS.COM 
<br>Subject: Re: "poor" for "pore" etc.
<br>
<br>Peter McGraw wrote:
<br>
<br>   
<br>My aunt once told me about a woman of her acquaintance who would "poor" water
<br> out of a pitcher.  My aunt said she
<br>asked her once what she called people who didn't have any money, and she said,
<br> "Oh, you mean pore people?"  I have
<br>no information as to where this was.
<br>
<br>   
<br>I wonder to what degree this swap was in the ears of the beholder. It is, or
<br> was, quite common to represent
<br>"Brooklynese" in print by swapping "oi" and "er": "I hoid ya needed some
<br> T'ree-In-One Erl." Rather than being swapped, it
<br>may be the case that the speaker merges the two sounds to something that is
<br> phonetically between the hearer's
<br>expectations, and the hearer's reaction and analysis, if conscious and put into
<br> words, would go something like this,
<br>using the linear scale of integers to represent a range of n-dimensional
<br> acoustic space:
<br>
<br>"I use /1/ in this word, and it sounds like [1] when I say it, but this person
<br> is saying the word with [3]. That's not a sound I
<br>would use at all, but it's off in the direction of /5/. I guess this person uses
<br> /5/ where I use /1/."
<br>
<br>The same process -- I hesitate to call it "logic" -- would map "oi" into "er"
<br> and "er" into "oi", or "or" into "Ur" and "Ur" into
<br>"or". (Try saying dat t'ree times fast!)
<br>
<br>       Mark A. Mandel : Senior Linguist : mark[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]dragonsys.com
<br>    Dragon Systems, Inc. : speech recognition : +1 617 965-5200
<br> 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02160, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com/
<br>