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Joined: Dec 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Michael Jackson's bedroom
Does it float?
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Joined: Mar 2001
Posts: 4,189
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Mar 2001
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Bean, the about/aboot was a serious question...really.
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Joined: Mar 2001
Posts: 4,189
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Mar 2001
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Michael Jackson's bedroom
Does it float?It can do anything Michael says it does. 
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Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 6,511
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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That forwarding/shortening of the vowel sound is also common in tidewater Virginia -- in fact you'll hear it all along the mid-Atlantic Coast. I wonder if there's any connection.
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Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 1,156
old hand
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OP
old hand
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 1,156 |
It's called raising because your tongue is actually in a higher place in your mouth when making that vowel. However, the "rule" for raising is different in Canada than those parts of the US where it's found. We raise the vowels before an unvoiced consonant, and leave the sound "low" before a voiced consonant. I think in Virginia it's applied to all instances of one of the diphthongs (can't remember if it's ai or au) whether voiced or unvoiced. The info is in my linguistics book at home, and I am, of course, at school...
I don't think they [the linguists] have generally concluded just why it arose. Certainly Canadians of Scottish descent seem to raise more strongly than others. And many of the first English-speaking Canadians came from Scotland. But we all* seem to do it.
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Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 1,156
old hand
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OP
old hand
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 1,156 |
Here's a link about it, but the bloody sound thingies don't work for some reason. And sound files would be most useful in this case! http://www.ic.arizona.edu/~lsp/CanadianEnglish.html
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Joined: Nov 2002
Posts: 180
member
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Joined: Nov 2002
Posts: 180 |
"Bean, the about/aboot was a serious question...really."
Aieeee! It's NOT "aboot"! It's ABOAT. Maybe I should let a Canajan answer that question, but it drives me nutz when people can't tell the difference. It was one of the first things I noticed when I moved to Ontario in 1978, and when I mentioned it to my friends, who were all language students, they all said, "Oh, no, we don't soand like that!"
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Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 1,156
old hand
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OP
old hand
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 1,156 |
If it were aboot, then we would be able to rhyme words like "about" and "flute". Well, we don't. They don't rhyme. I like to spell the -out sound something like uh-oo (as opposed to USn and Brit ah-oo), where "uh" is the schwa sound. The whole vowel ends up shorter with the Canadian Raised diphthong. One of my favourite demo pairs of words is lout/loud. Loud ends up so much longer than lout. They are so similar but different because we only make this vowel change before an unvoiced consonant (see above).
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Joined: Nov 2002
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member
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Joined: Nov 2002
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But innyway, I'm a midwesterner, and I say "hock" and "hawk" the same. Ditto "all" and "awl".
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Joined: Mar 2001
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Yes, thinking back now, the sound is actually much closer to aBOAT than to aBOOT.
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