Yeah, I meant for "ra" to contast with the "caw" sound at the beginning in exactly the way Tam states. (I don't remember the symbols for these sounds and I wouldn't know how to make them show up on this page if I did.)
I have never noticed the it/ut thing in Esther's speech; I'll have to listen for that next time I see her.
In general, it was kind of funny to realize that like Okies, Texans often sound like hicks, but in a distinctly different way. I can admit this now, but I was momentarily afraid the first time Robert spoke to a rural Texas convenience store clerk in my presence and addressed the person with the word "Howdy." (Robert's accent can change a lot depending on who he's talking to and it reaches a particularly interesting equilibrium when he is with his upstate NY raised grandmother, his Fort Worth-accented mother, and me.)
Speaking of rural Texas, at the Parks & Wildlife Expo last month, I interviewed visitors and one of the questions was whether they lived in an urban or rural area. Every rural resident pronounced this word as basically one, maybe one and half, syllable and several people actually made a point after saying "rual" or "rurl" (light to nonexistent second "r") to say it again, trying to follow my three-syllable example. One guy was clearly embarrassed but I told him that his pronunciation totally beat mine in terms of authenticity.
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ninetydegrees
Re: Accents
on 2006-11-06 09:13 pm (UTC)Yeah, I meant for "ra" to contast with the "caw" sound at the beginning in exactly the way Tam states. (I don't remember the symbols for these sounds and I wouldn't know how to make them show up on this page if I did.)
I have never noticed the it/ut thing in Esther's speech; I'll have to listen for that next time I see her.
In general, it was kind of funny to realize that like Okies, Texans often sound like hicks, but in a distinctly different way. I can admit this now, but I was momentarily afraid the first time Robert spoke to a rural Texas convenience store clerk in my presence and addressed the person with the word "Howdy." (Robert's accent can change a lot depending on who he's talking to and it reaches a particularly interesting equilibrium when he is with his upstate NY raised grandmother, his Fort Worth-accented mother, and me.)
Speaking of rural Texas, at the Parks & Wildlife Expo last month, I interviewed visitors and one of the questions was whether they lived in an urban or rural area. Every rural resident pronounced this word as basically one, maybe one and half, syllable and several people actually made a point after saying "rual" or "rurl" (light to nonexistent second "r") to say it again, trying to follow my three-syllable example. One guy was clearly embarrassed but I told him that his pronunciation totally beat mine in terms of authenticity.