trochee

A discussion with

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!