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  • From: Clansgian AT wmconnect.com
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] Snow
  • Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2008 13:14:43 EDT



> >Nor in Northern GA..here, it is Ser! More akin to the speech of Gomer
> Pyle than Scarlett O'Hara!

Linguists call this "R coloring". Most of the several Southern dialects have
very heavy R coloring. Linguistically the English R is not a consonant but
rather a semi-vowel. In coastal Alamaba and Mississippi the semivowel tends
toward the neutral 'schewa', the sound of 'o' in 'come'. On the east coast
(Savanah and Charleston) it tends toward the 'a' in 'father'. In almost all
other dialects it is heavily colored and the most in the Appalachian speech.
It
is anywhere from an irritation to an insult to assume that all Southerners
talk
like Scarlet O'Hara. I don't recall in the Gone With the Wind flick how they
handled this, but when Scarlet went from the coast to Atlanta, although her
accent was about right, the locals there would not have called the conflict a
'woh-wah'.

One's ears become very accustomed to the amount of R coloring in their own
dialect. When we hear someone from Boston talking, it sounds like they are
saying "I am going in my cah to get a pizzer."




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