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Posted: **Wed Aug 02, 2017 10:19 am**

Viktor77 wrote:People down here in Memphis keep asking me "Where are you staying?" to ask where we're living. Is this use of 'to stay' a Southernism?

*Edit* Typo.

I've never heard that from southerners in my whole life, and I've lived almost my whole life here in Austin. I hear this much more often from Indians, though, very often without the inverted word order ("Where you are staying?").

I mean, I guess I can imagine southerners saying this if you recently moved to Memphis and weren't intending to stay long, or something like that. (Or if you were just visiting, of course, but then wouldn't that be normal usage for you, too?). Maybe it depends on context?

Posted: **Wed Aug 02, 2017 10:25 am**

Viktor77 wrote:People down here in Memphis keep asking me "Where are you staying?" to ask where we're living. Is this use of 'to stay' a Southernism?

*Edit* Typo.

probably. people say that in scotland too (though usually as "where do you stay?")

Posted: **Sun Aug 27, 2017 9:05 am**

Can we agree to stop saying "attorneys general," please? The plural is "attorney generals." I know that from a purely prescriptivist angle it doesn't make sense to add the plural to the adjective, but it's an unusual word with an adjective after the noun it describes and "attorney generals" is the generally accepted form.

Posted: **Sun Aug 27, 2017 10:11 am**

Viktor77 wrote:Can we agree to stop saying "attorneys general," please? The plural is "attorney generals." I know that from a purely prescriptivist angle it doesn't make sense to add the plural to the adjective, but it's an unusual word with an adjective after the noun it describes and "attorney generals" is the generally accepted form.

According to whom?

ETA: This Google ngram is instructive. It shows usage of "attorney generals" remaining basically flat over the last century relative to "attorneys general", which went from roughly the same incidence to nearly nine times greater. So if there's a trend here, it's going quite markedly in the opposite direction to what you have suggested.

Moreover, some of the occurrences of the former are actually "attorney generals'", i.e. plural possessive, which may be an explicit choice to avoid amgibuity, e.g. "Attorney generals' intervention before regulatory agencies" (where "Attorneys general" would make it sound like you were talking about the general intervention of attorneys rather than the intervention of attorneys general).

Posted: **Sun Aug 27, 2017 10:32 am**

Viktor77 wrote:Can we agree to stop saying "attorneys general," please? The plural is "attorney generals." I know that from a purely prescriptivist angle it doesn't make sense to add the plural to the adjective, but it's an unusual word with an adjective after the noun it describes and "attorney generals" is the generally accepted form.

Does this also apply to "brother-in-laws"? The noun definitely takes the plural.

Posted: **Sun Aug 27, 2017 10:42 am**

Viktor77 wrote:Can we agree to stop saying "attorneys general," please? The plural is "attorney generals." I know that from a purely prescriptivist angle it doesn't make sense to add the plural to the adjective, but it's an unusual word with an adjective after the noun it describes and "attorney generals" is the generally accepted form.

Reminds me of Polish prawo jazdy “driver's license” (lit. “a right of driving”), a noun with a postposed genitive, which has become sucha set phrase that people tend to misspeak by declining the second element instead of the first one.

Posted: **Sun Aug 27, 2017 6:12 pm**

May or may not be "innovative" (rather than "retained"), but...

From an Irish-born speaker: I was never to... to mean "I've never been to". ("I was never to New York", for instance).
From another Irish-born speaker: press to mean "cupboard".
From an English speaker: speakative to mean "talkative". Talking about a pet, so possibly a humorous element, but it didn't sound that way.

Posted: **Sun Aug 27, 2017 6:59 pm**

Salmoneus wrote:From an Irish-born speaker: I was never to... to mean "I've never been to". ("I was never to New York", for instance).

That does sound incredibly Irish. I wonder if that's a Gaelic influence like after + participle constructs or just a preserved archaic feature.

Posted: **Sun Aug 27, 2017 8:55 pm**

Zaarin wrote:
Salmoneus wrote:From an Irish-born speaker: I was never to... to mean "I've never been to". ("I was never to New York", for instance).
That does sound incredibly Irish. I wonder if that's a Gaelic influence like after + participle constructs or just a preserved archaic feature.

A bit of both? The perfect construction is innovative in English. The closest analogue in Irish is even more recent and much more restricted in usage. (Historically speaking, that is. Recently its use seems to be greatly expanding at least in the speech of L2 speakers.)

Posted: **Tue Sep 12, 2017 10:57 am**

I've been mocked for saying 'eclipse, but give it another couple generations and kids'll be surprised to hear that the noun was ever pronounced any other way.

Posted: **Wed Sep 13, 2017 12:20 am**

Do people say it that way now?

Posted: **Thu Sep 14, 2017 12:37 pm**

I do.

Posted: **Thu Sep 14, 2017 1:59 pm**

Do you mean with the stress on the first syllable ... like E-clips? I don't think I've ever heard anyone pronounce eclipse that way. Do you still pronounce the verb with final stress? Is it becoming one of those noun-verb pairs with a stress distinction?

Zaarin wrote:Does this also apply to "brother-in-laws"? The noun definitely takes the plural.

I've heard people say "son-of-a-bitches" before, lol.

Pole, the wrote:Reminds me of Polish prawo jazdy “driver's license” (lit. “a right of driving”), a noun with a postposed genitive, which has become sucha set phrase that people tend to misspeak by declining the second element instead of the first one.

It's taken me most of my life to stop my brain from automatically coming out with "slepwalked" as the past tense of "sleepwalk" ...

Posted: **Thu Sep 14, 2017 2:04 pm**

Imralu wrote:Do you mean with the stress on the first syllable ... like E-clips? I don't think I've ever heard anyone pronounce eclipse that way. Do you still pronounce the verb with final stress? Is it becoming one of those noun-verb pairs with a stress distinction?

Same; with stress on the first syllable it sounds like a 90s internet business, back before everything became iWhatever (thanks, Apple). :p

Posted: **Thu Sep 14, 2017 2:11 pm**

I'm not clear on whether the first vowel is supposed to be /i/ or /ɛ/.

Also, is it an Indian thing to say "cut it into half" instead of "cut it in half"? I only just noticed this usage yesterday.

Imralu wrote:I've heard people say "son-of-a-bitches" before, lol.

One joke I learned from my parents is "one and one, sum of which is two" -> "one and one, sonofabitch, is two."

Posted: **Thu Sep 14, 2017 2:21 pm**

Vijay wrote:I'm not clear on whether the first vowel is supposed to be /i/ or /ɛ/.

For me it's just a schwa ... it could be /i:/ if I stress the word but that feels like a spelling pronunciation to me ... but definitely not /e/.

Posted: **Thu Sep 14, 2017 2:24 pm**

Imralu wrote:
Vijay wrote:I'm not clear on whether the first vowel is supposed to be /i/ or /ɛ/.
For me it's just a schwa ...

Yeah, but I mean for people who have stress on the first syllable. Is it E-clips or 'eck lips?

Posted: **Thu Sep 14, 2017 3:40 pm**

Vijay wrote:
Imralu wrote:
Vijay wrote:I'm not clear on whether the first vowel is supposed to be /i/ or /ɛ/.
For me it's just a schwa ...
Yeah, but I mean for people who have stress on the first syllable. Is it E-clips or 'eck lips?

Ah, yeah ... that makes sense! I'm assuming E-clips just because of my own spelling pronunciation ... but honestly, emagining someone saying it like E-Clips is just weird to me, so it may as well be eck-lips.

Posted: **Thu Sep 14, 2017 3:54 pm**

For me the noun is [ˈiˌkʰɰɘʔps] whereas the verb is [ɘˈkʰɰɘʔps].

Posted: **Thu Sep 14, 2017 10:08 pm**

I have heard it with the stress on the initial /i/ before, though I tend to associate that with a more rural dialect for whatever (probably biased) reason.

Posted: **Thu Sep 14, 2017 11:24 pm**

Yay for observing language change in the making!

Posted: **Thu Sep 14, 2017 11:44 pm**

Hmm, strange. I guess this isn't the "what pronunciation do you use" thread, but what about "synapse"? I remember consciously deciding to pronounce it with word-final stress, partly by analogy with "eclipse", "ellipse" and "collapse" and partly because I didn't want to have to decide whether to go with stressed /aɪ/ or stressed /ɪ/ in the first syllable--with my current pronunciation I just used reduced /ɪ/~/ə/.

I guess I would probably pronounce the noun "relapse" with first-syllable stress, though. So much for consistency ... and I dunno about "prolapse", since I don't think I've ever actually said it aloud.

Posted: **Tue Oct 03, 2017 7:03 pm**

I think I just heard someone in a TV commercial say Fredercksburg so it sounds like "Fred-reeks-burg."

Posted: **Tue Oct 03, 2017 10:56 pm**

Vijay wrote:I think I just heard someone in a TV commercial say Fredercksburg so it sounds like "Fred-reeks-burg."

Sounds like typical Southern Vowel Shift to me and Fredericksburg is in the South.

Posted: **Tue Oct 03, 2017 11:20 pm**

linguoboy wrote:
Vijay wrote:I think I just heard someone in a TV commercial say Fredercksburg so it sounds like "Fred-reeks-burg."

Sounds like typical Southern Vowel Shift to me and Fredericksburg is in the South.

That's not what it sounded like to me (there was no diphthongization here, just vowel tensing - unless of course I just heard it wrong), and to be clear, they meant this Fredericksburg. I've been there but never heard anyone pronounce it that way before. And this person otherwise did not have a particularly Southern accent FWIR, though maybe I'll try to pay attention more if I see it again. If I'm lucky, maybe someone will have posted it on YouTube or something, too.

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