Stupid Regional Sayings

I've got a Canadian professor this quarter, and he pronounces the "ou" sound as a tight "oo"

It's not as obvious as in the South Park movie, but it is there. I think it's cute

Perhaps it sounds more "oo" tha "ow", because Amercans tend to say it "ao"

Beggin' ya pardon, guvnah. Would you like a tomato?

It's hardly a myth. As someone already stated, I think you're having a bit of trouble recognizing your own accent. I live in Niagara County, NY, directly across the river from Ontario, and I hear it literally almost every day.

In fact, I spent last weekend in Toronto, where my girlfriend and I had to try our very best not to laugh while attending a benefit concert, and we heard each and every one of the speakers say it. Also, I can distinctly remember watching "You Can't Do That On Television" on Nickelodeon back in the early 80's, and hearing it then, so it certainly predates South Park. Back then I had no idea the pronunciation was a Canadian thing. I just thought it was how the cool kids say it since it was how they said it on Nickelodeon, and so I began immitating it. My father heard this and quickly educated me. "Why are you talking like a Canadian?"


I'm not sure what who invented English has to do with anything. English is a hacked together language created and still evolving from bits and pieces of countless other languages, some long dead, some still in use. It wasn't "invented" by anyone, but even if it had been, its birth was thousands of years before the invention of icecream, soda, or the float. The origins of language have absolutely nothing to do with the naming of new inventions.

Now, if you want some actual relevant history, Americans did invent the soda fountain, as well as the enitire modern carbonated beverage industry. While it's true that the first man-made carbonated water was invented by an Englishman (at the time called "artificial mineral water", the concept of adding sweet flavors to it and regularly drinking it did not become popular until some 60 years later in the US, where it was manufactured and sold by pharmacists across the nation who believed that carbonated water was a health-food. In efforts to make this supposed new wonder drug taste good, pharmacists began adding all kinds of flavorings to it, and thus gave rise to many of the drinks we now know and love, including Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Dr. Pepper, and many others. Root beer was actually one of the first such concoctions to catch on and become wildly popular. It was invented by Charles Hires, a Philadelphia pharmacist, who in 1876 first introduced it to the public at the US Centenial exhibition. The rootbeer float wasn't long to follow as pharmacists began to float ice cream on top of the drink in order to make this "health-food" more marketable to kids. It was this concept of "floating" the ice cream on top of the root beer that gave rise to the name "root beer float", although today's version of the drink usually has the ice cream packed all the way to the bottom of the glass.

So there you have it, Americans didn't invent the English language, but they did invent the float. Now, since it's only proper that the one who invents a thing is the one who gets to name it, and since the original inventors of the float called it a float, that's what it's called. Once again, case closed.

By the way, ain't The History Channel grand? I learned most of this from a little mini series they had a while back called "The History of American Food." They spent quite a while talking about soda.

Stick that in your marmite, bumbaklotts!

...mmm.... I crave Reed's Jamaican Ginger Beer (the extra ginger kind that burns when you drink it). Which reminds me, I have a stash of crystallized ginger at work. Yay!

The true statement at the beginning of the quote contrasts amusingly with the proscriptivist assertion at the end. In Minnesota ask for a cherry pop if you want a cherry-flavored carbonated beverage; ask for a cherry soda if you want a cherry-flavored carbonated beverage with ice cream :9

Okay, I've officially decided that linguistics is an interesting area of study. This is a total thread hijack, but after googling up some linguistics webpages, I found one that has some .au examples of the "Candian raising" that it's claimed is responsible for this phenomenon. I listened to the audio, and I can't hear anything odd about it. Is this a fair representation of the "aboot" you people hear when we talk?

WaHaHaHahahaha!!!!!!!!

(puts it on repeat)

Maybe they invented the float, but certainly not pop. You miss one very important point here, and that is you confuse accent with meaning. The queen says "oot" Americans say "aowt" I agree that some Canadians say "oot" but they are largely in the minority. I say "out" as in "ouch", not "ooch".

This thread is not about "hood and trunk, or bonnet and boot". It is about stupid regionalized sayings. Not local dialect. Dialect has a valid history in language.

Do you have any idea how ridiculous "y'all" sounds to a Canadian? Being French Canadian in origin, I find it quite humerous when Americans say french words. I'm sure Hispanics in the US and Mexico like to chuckle at American accents too. "Dose porko talk-oze"

Yeah that's pretty much it. It's not "oo" as in "aboot" though, not as dramatic as that. It's just a tightening of the "ou" sound to one quick thing. When you say "out" with an american accent, your lips open wider to say the "owt" sound... with a canadian accent your lips are more closed, which brings the "oo" sound.

Clear?

"y'all" is not said in all places in the US. It is regionalized. I have been other places where in the U.S. where "y'all" is made fun of.

Ain't is also not said in all places in the states. People in the states chuckle at the accents of other parts of the country as well. For example, I absolutely loathe a New York accent- especially on a woman. It sounds so crass and obnoxious. blech.

Missouri = Miz-urra

Where did that come from?

Via the appalachians, I'd reckon.

Listen to any dirty south hip hop and you will hurr that.

Remember the movie "Nell?"

A win for linguistics is a good hijack in my opinion

Yes, that's a good recording of an average non-Francophone Canadian accent. "Raising" is an accurate description of what happens to the tongue position when compared with English and American dialects. Fittingly it's the technical phonological term as well. The American attempt to approximate it in Latin letters is pretty misleading, as it suggests what linguists call a "high back rounded vowel." The actual Canadian pronunciation is a medial- to high-back rounded diphthong. A more literal "American" transcription would be "abeut."

Am I the only person who giggles when she reads "rounded diphthong?"

Let's try to keep seperate ideas seperate, shall we? You've put the float/pop thing in the same paragraph with the accent thing, which implies it's part of the same idea. It's not. These are two completely seperate things.

So, to take them one at a time...

First, the invention of soda:
As I said (and you're free to look this up in any historical reference), artificially carbonated water was invented by an Englishman (Joseph Priestly, 1767 to be exact), but the concept of consuming it as a sweetly flavored beverage was invented by American pharmacists. These drinks became popular in 1832, when John Matthews, an American, invented and mass produced a practical apparatus for carbonating water. Thus, the soda fountain was born, which is what directly descended to the soda industry we know today. Pharmacists that had concocted popular flavors such as root beer, birch beer, Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola, Dr. Pepper, 7-Up, etc. began to bottle their recipes, and the rest is history. Ginger ale was invented in ireland, but almost all other flavors of soda we know today were invented in the US. Even the so called "Jamaican" Ginger Beer actually comes from California.

In summary, you could say that the ancestors of what we know today as soda came from elsewhere, but that what it is now most certainly was created the US.

Second, accent:
I never ever confused accent with meaning. I never tried to say that the Canadian pronunciation of the word "out" gives the word itself a different definition than any other pronunciation. I was simply pointing out an interesting (and arguably amusing) way of saying something that is tied to a particular geographic region, which is what this thread is about. Most people chose to point out certain words or phrases that exist solely in certain areas. I chose to expand by pointing out a unique pronunciation that exists only in one place. I find it interesting that most Canadians pronounce almost everything exactly the same way most Americans do, but that one sound is different. That makes it stand out just as much as any of the special words and phrases that are listed here.

You are the one who is demonstrating confusion when you try to call it a dialect. Dialect has little to do with pronunciation alone; that's called accent. Dialect has everything to do with wordings and phrasings tied to specific regions or specific groups of people. For example, one can have a Cajun accent while not speaking in the Cajun dialect. Cajun as a dialect is a unique mixture of words and phrases from English, French, and some other things no one can quite trace (probably native American), while Cajun as an accent is simply an alteration of the way certain words are pronounced.

So, contrary to what you said, I would submit that this thread, which you rightly pointed out is about regional sayings, is absolutely about local dialect. Regional sayings are what constitute local dialect. If you speak words and phrases that make sense only in your area then you are by definition speaking in your local dialect. That's what dialect means.

Oh, and as for the "y'all" thing, I agree with you. It's a completely silly word. Most of us never use it.

One thing I found absolutely fascinating was an instance of local linguistic variance I encountered last year. I was in the local pub one night when a stranger at the bar was able to pick out the town I went to university in (Kingston, Ontario) based solely on my pronunciation of a few words (apparently it's sufficiently well known to have its own name -- the "Ottawa valley twang". Kingston is only about 250km away from Toronto, but apparently there's sufficient localization over that distance to be noticable by a stranger over the background noise of a pub.

I love the fact "y'all" is singular. And the plural is "all y'all".

I have never, ever, heard y'all as singlular and I was born and raised in Texas. Never.
Singular is "you," plural is "y'all" or occasionally "all y'all"- but that is rare. Nobody walks up to someone else and says "y'all okay?" unless there are multiple people indicated.

It's not like we're Rastafarians talking about "I and I" -because then it would actually make sense to use y'all in the singular. http://www.answers.com/topic/rastafarian-vocabulary
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rastafarian_vocabulary

I guess that's a good regional example then.

I got the "y'all"=singular, "all y'all" (or "y'all two", "y'all three" etc.) = plural from a guy I used to work with. He was from north Florida and had lived in Texas, and his girlfriend was from Louisiana and that's how each of "their people" used the variations of "y'all".

Thanks for the clarification, initially your post sounded from a purely "American" point of view when using "case closed" at the end. Your point about the difference between dialect and accent is valid, so point taken.

Now that we cleared that up, I would like to expand on the word "Cajun" which is one of those stupid regionalized sayings. Cajun is derived from the word Acadian. To the average American (and most Canadians) Acadian would appear to be pronounced " A - kay - dee - ann" Where in french, would be "A - cad - zjan" having come from L'Acadie. Originally a French colony in present day Nova Scotia, France betrayed it's own settlers by giving Nova Scotia back to the British and for the next 25 years, were systematically deported to Louisianna. The word Cajun comes from other Americans through the lack of pronunciation skills in french.

Now here is the funniest part, something that makes me laugh at the stupid regionalizations of my own French Canadian ancestors. French Canadian is a very archaeic form of the European French. Having its roots deeply embedded in "old french", French Canadians cling to to this like shit to a wool blanket. French have this also have a great tendancy to apply french pronunciations to other words (even in Spanish, tequila is pronounced "tekki-la" with the accent on the last syllable). The word Cajun is pronounced by most French Canadians as "Ka-zhun", purely based on the anglicized word "Cajun" I know very few Canadians that describe Cajuns as Acadian, even though they are are largely aware of the history of them. Go figure

I thought this study was interesting. Sadly, Canada isn't covered, but I can confirm that we say "pop" in Ontario, and in BC as well.

I've only met a few Quebecquois in my day but I noticed this as well. Having studied Old and Renaissance French language and pronunciation to an extent it was an easy thing to discover. And yet the singers I've worked with invariably revert to Parisian pronunciation when the curtain goes up (so to speak).