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Coupla questions bout New York City English
Could anybody clue me in on this:
How do they say "on" and "gone" in New York?
Is it ɑən and gɑən or ɑən and gɔən? Or can it be ɔən and gɔən?
What about the word "accent", "accomplish", "accomplice"
and "everybody", "nobody" etc.
Are they 'æksənt, ə'kəmplish, ə'kəmplis, 'ɛvriˌbədi, 'noʊˌbədi?
About the tense-lax split:
Do young New Yorkers keep the can(modal verb)/can't distinction?
(that is kænt/keənt)
Has the distribution of the split changed?
Do all non-rhotic New Yorkers lack hurry-furry, nearer-mirror, merry-marry-Mary, tory-torrent mergers? And are there any New Yorkers with non-rhotic pronunciations in words like first, bird, world?
Do New Yorkers pronounce "involve", "closet", "boss", "often"
as ɪnˈvɔəlv, klɔəzət, bɔəs, ɔəfn?
3rd question _ in those words( bird, world) New Yorkers use rhotic pronunciation, although in other positions they could be non rhotic( are, bar, car, never, here etc...)
I'm not originally from New York, but I've lived here for ten years. In my observation, most New Yorkers tend to rhyme on and gone with Don, not Dawn, but that's not universal.
I do not believe that New Yorkers use the schwa sound for the second syllables of accent, accomplish, or accomplice unless they're talking very rapidly for some reason, but they do for use the schwa in nobody and everybody, and sometimes people even pronounce those words so that they sound to me like nobuddy and everybuddy.
Young, middle-class New Yorkers are less likely than older residents to make a big distinction between can the verb and can the noun.
Older, non-rhotic New Yorkers make the distinctions in hurry/furry, nearer/mirror, and merry/marry/Mary, and Tory/torrent. Young New Yorkers are all but exclusively rhotic, so I don't hear enough young, non-rhotic ones to know whether they still make those distinctions. I think most rhotic New Yorkers probably make a distinction between nearer and mirror. Young people here, if they're native, tend to have different vowels in Tory and torrent. Hurry/furry and merry/marry/Mary are pretty variable from person to person. Yes, there are some people who have non-rhotic pronunciations for bird, first, and world, but they're few and far between. I hear it when I pass by construction sites, and I hear it from Metro-North and subway employees, so maybe these days it's mainly a male, blue-collar/union-job thing.
I don't know about involve, but some people do pronounce closet, boss, and often the way you described. That pronunciation is clearly recessive, though, and probably makes young, upwardly-mobile New Yorkers cringe if they hear their parents or grandparents talk that way in public.
As to your third question, yes, some people are rhotic for bird/first, etc. but not in other situations. The boid/foist/New Joisey pronunciation is perhaps the most stigmatized element of the historic New York accent and the r in those words is probably the first to be acquired if individuals make a conscious effort to develop rhotic speech.
>>Yes, there are some people who have non-rhotic pronunciations for bird, first, and world, but they're few and far between. I hear it when I pass by construction sites, and I hear it from Metro-North and subway employees, so maybe these days it's mainly a male, blue-collar/union-job thing.>>
You have offered some useful reflections, Jeff, but I would guess that those speakers are not few and far between, so much as they tend to stay in their neighbourhoods where you are perhaps less likely to venture (like the Bronx), when they are not at their jobs where you would encounter them.
New York accents have their origins in the Netherlands. New York was a Dutch colony, Nieuw-Amsterdam, lying within the larger entity of Nieuw-Nederland (now New York State).
In fact, Dutch names are all about New York : There are Harlem (Haarlem), Brooklyn (Breukelen) and Flushing (Vlissingen). The Bronx (earlier called Broncksland) was originally a farm owned by a planter named Jonas Bronck, a Swedish-born immigrant from Holland. Hence, the idea in Colonial days was, "Let's all go out to the Broncks' place and pick apples."
Then there is the Bowery in lower Manhattan. In Nederlandse, the word bouwerij means "farm". It was a green byway in the days when Wall Street ran along the wall of Fort Amsterdam. Broadway was called Breedeweg (the same elements with the same meaning) : that was a Dutch commercial thoroughfare which was paved right on top of the ancient Indian trail in order to accommodate the merchants' heavy wagons. Staten Island was named Staaten-Eylandt in honour of the Estates, which is to say, the Dutch Parliament.
These very influential colonists introduced the American words cookie (from Nederlandse, koekje, "little cake"), cole slaw (< koolslaa, kool salaad, "cabbage salad") and Santa Claus (< Sinter-Klaas, "Saint Nicholas").
JeffinNYC, thanks a lot for the explanation.
One more question:
is it true that some non-rhotic New Yorkers, merry-marry-Mary mergered New Yorkers pronounce words like "Mary", "Maryland", "vary"
with æ instead of ɛə?
Oh yeah, I almost forgot, I was wondering do they pronounce
"want" as wənt in NY?
ah fuck you guys, you are full of shit.
To fake Trump - what a sad jerkoff you are.
in NYC it's doll [dAl], involve [In'vAlv] unrounded, but
tall [tQl] rounded, so
DOLL and TALL don't rhyme (different than in Western US, Florida, Boston, Canadian English...)
Furthermore HONG KONG [unrounded] does not rhyme with LONG SONG [rounded] in NYC...These are perfect rhymes in Western US English (for example in L.A. or in Denver)
@kevin - it's strange but my dictionary would fit exactly to NYC English with rounded vowel in: tall,long, song. It supposed to represent General American but that British publishers made a mistake :P
"Oh yeah, I almost forgot, I was wondering do they pronounce
"want" as wənt in NY?"
I've heard people say it like that in conversation, but I don't think very many people would pronounce it that way in isolation. It probably goes along with gunna, whut, wutter, and dunno.
"One more question:
is it true that some non-rhotic New Yorkers, merry-marry-Mary mergered New Yorkers pronounce words like "Mary", "Maryland", "vary"
with æ instead of ɛə?"
I don't know from observation. It sounds reasonable--for non-rhotic speakers the r sound would occur entirely after the first syllable, so the conditions for the merger to occur might not be met for some individuals, but again, I don't know.
I read somewhere that NYers pronounce words like
"behind", "return", "depend","believe" with i rather than ɪ or ə in the first syllable (bihɑɪnd and so on); and words like Monday, Friday as Mondee,
Fridee; and rhyme "tour" with "more".
I think the name of the book was American Dialects Manual or something and it didn't strike me as reliable, so... ?
While I'm at it, do NYers drop the H in the word forehead?
Just offering my two cents on the original question:
"How do they say "on" and "gone" in New York?
Is it ɑən and gɑən or ɑən and gɔən? Or can it be ɔən and gɔən?"
It's variable. Actually "gone" is usually just /gAn/, whereas "on" is pronounced, in various ethnolects in basically all of the ways you listed above.
"What about the word "accent", "accomplish", "accomplice"
and "everybody", "nobody" etc.
Not really sure about "accent"--it's probably pronounced similarly to other American accents, with equal stress on both syllables. The next two words aren't pronounced unusually in NYC English to my knowledge.
In stronger New York accents, "everybody" is /ɛvɹibɑdi/ as opposed to GenAm /ɛvɹibʌdi/ or /ɛvɹibədi/.
"About the tense-lax split:
Do young New Yorkers keep the can(modal verb)/can't distinction?
(that is kænt/keənt)
Has the distribution of the split changed?"
The tense lax split is still going strong, and no the distribution of the split hasn't particularly changed, but there is hella variation.
"Do all non-rhotic New Yorkers lack hurry-furry, nearer-mirror, merry-marry-Mary, tory-torrent mergers?
I would say yes, all non-rhotic NYC speakers maintain those splits.
"And are there any New Yorkers with non-rhotic pronunciations in words like first, bird, world?"
Not so much anymore. The pronunciation of "world" as /wɜɪɫd/ used to be widespread, but started disappearing after World War II. You almost never hear it spoken by anybody born after 1940.
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