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Gary Gygax, pronunciation spellings, and RP -- my sordid past
A discussion with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tsenft regarding the relative social stigma of various linguistic forms in US vs. UK English led to my rambling about r-less and r-ful dialects of English, and orthographic socialization.
Which makes me think of my first real conscious encounter (I was perhaps ten years old) with orthographic standards mismatching with language standards: in the Gary Gygax Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Player's Handbook, which included a discussion of the word milieu in the sense of the construction of the world ("a fantasy milieu"), new to me at the time.
The discussion included a pronunciation guide that indicated that it should be pronounced "mill-YER". Of course, this was completely mystifying to me, and made no sense to me in any dialect I was familiar with (East Coast US Standard and American Southern (Georgia)). I knew next to nothing about French, but I was pretty sure that there was no /r/ sound in this word.
I eventually worked it out (years later) when I realized that Gygax and his uncredited co-authors were writing in a spelling tuned for Received Pronunciation, in which the orthographic "mill-YER" would be pronounced [mɪlˈjɜː], which is a pretty good approximation of the French. Had he written "mill-YEH" an RP speaker would have read [mɪlˈjɛ], with the final vowel too front and too short, but the phonological effect of the underlying /r/ in RP is to lengthen and back the [ɛ] to [ɜː].
Oh, and GIP due tokirinqueen -- thanks!
tsenft regarding the relative social stigma of various linguistic forms in US vs. UK English led to my rambling about r-less and r-ful dialects of English, and orthographic socialization.Which makes me think of my first real conscious encounter (I was perhaps ten years old) with orthographic standards mismatching with language standards: in the Gary Gygax Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Player's Handbook, which included a discussion of the word milieu in the sense of the construction of the world ("a fantasy milieu"), new to me at the time.
The discussion included a pronunciation guide that indicated that it should be pronounced "mill-YER". Of course, this was completely mystifying to me, and made no sense to me in any dialect I was familiar with (East Coast US Standard and American Southern (Georgia)). I knew next to nothing about French, but I was pretty sure that there was no /r/ sound in this word.
I eventually worked it out (years later) when I realized that Gygax and his uncredited co-authors were writing in a spelling tuned for Received Pronunciation, in which the orthographic "mill-YER" would be pronounced [mɪlˈjɜː], which is a pretty good approximation of the French. Had he written "mill-YEH" an RP speaker would have read [mɪlˈjɛ], with the final vowel too front and too short, but the phonological effect of the underlying /r/ in RP is to lengthen and back the [ɛ] to [ɜː].
Oh, and GIP due to
kirinqueen -- thanks!
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Yay, I have an icon twin. :)
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I think the r approximation sucks. It's not anything like the sound.
It would be better replaced by a cup sound ( i can't do the symbols) . When I dialect teach french. I always substitute the cup sound and it makes people sound way more French. Just saying.
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:)
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Kid like you know.
:)
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Since American vowels are in general a little farther forward than British, the American vowel in "cup" might be somewhere between ɜ and ʌ -- so I think both are pretty good approximations.
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I wish I had cute stories about being little and liking theatre. I don't.I discovered it really late !
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(People who don't use IPA in their articles don't have their articles read by me.)
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My most interest dialect contact story involves me totally not being able to figure out song lyrics because I have a Canadian raising pattern and the singer did not.
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But even if Georgia Southern was r-less, I'd probably not have understood, because I had already acquired the prejudice of associating the written word with American Standard, and relegating Georgian to an oral dialect: I'd only ever heard Southern accents in oral contexts not associated with literacy -- neighbors, grocery stores -- while I heard (and used) the ECAS dialect with my parents (very literate) and at school.