[HN Gopher] The Pin-Pen Merger (2020)
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The Pin-Pen Merger (2020)
Author : polm23
Score : 46 points
Date : 2021-05-13 05:22 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.acelinguist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.acelinguist.com)
| bradrn wrote:
| English went through plenty of similar changes:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Englis....
| The full list is pretty interesting to read!
| excalibur wrote:
| PPAP
| smrq wrote:
| I suppose the pen-pen merger would be long pen.
| Y_Y wrote:
| It's funny that the author couldn't understand modern Irish
| farmers well enough to look for this effect. It absolutely does
| exist in the south-west of the country, and is not limited to
| farmers. It's not ubiquitous by any means, but it's completely
| unremarkable to anyone who's spent much time there.
|
| (Maybe I can have a startup that transcribes videos with strong
| dialects/accents.)
| smcl wrote:
| I think the reason they've come to the conclusion it's a farmer
| thing is related to the included image of "Mikey Joe O'Shea" -
| a sheep farmer that went semi-viral for having a very thick
| accent: https://www.irishpost.com/entertainment/irish-farmers-
| go-vir...
|
| The funny thing is, while the accent is indeed strong that is
| not IMO what makes what he says difficult to comprehend. He
| phrases what he says in a way that might be a bit unusual for
| folks like me (a Scot) so we don't immediately process what he
| says:
|
| "Well there's 45 sheep missing, like. And the(re's) lambs and
| everything with the sheep. That's come out to a nice bit of
| money, like. Be done about it? Nothing"
|
| Really cool accent though. I couldn't make out what his
| neighbour said immediately after when he points over to a hill
| in the distance. I _think_ (hope?) that 's gaelic because I
| couldn't make out a single word. He goes on to talk completely
| clearly in English about how it's a bit better when you have a
| good dog to protect the sheep.
| rhombocombus wrote:
| This is one of the few tells that I am from the south when I
| speak. If I am talking to someone from the mid-atlantic, where
| pin-pen is still strictly differentiated it can lead to some
| interesting confusion!
| fernly wrote:
| I can't believe the article doesn't even mention New Zealand,
| where "eh" has become "ih" (or "eeh") right across the
| vocabulary. It's the most striking thing an American tourist
| hears from arrival on.
| bitwize wrote:
| My father (LA area native) merges pen and pin. Both sound like
| "pin" in the midwesternish "standard" American accent. He may
| have picked it up from his mother (south Texas accent).
| AbsoluteDestiny wrote:
| Really good article. For those interested in this sort of thing,
| wired did a pretty good series on accents in the US recently on
| youtube:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1KP4ztKK0A
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsE_8j5RL3k
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw7pL7OkKEE
| twic wrote:
| > When back home in Texas, when asked for a "pen", I've never
| given someone a "pin" or the other way around.
|
| Hol' up. If Texans can distinguish the way other Texans say "pen"
| and "pin", then surely they aren't actually merged? Yes, the
| vowel sounds are very similar, and perhaps Yankees can't tell
| them apart, but they must be different.
| rossitter wrote:
| The point is that context usually suffices to tell which word
| is which, same as with wait/weight, time/thyme, and so on.
| Speakers with the pin-pen merger do pronounce these words the
| same, and I've known someone who was surprised to learn that I
| didn't--more than a year into our friendship. Yet he'd heard me
| talk about our friend Jen _and_ gin, possibly even in the same
| sentence. He just hadn 't noticed that I said them differently.
|
| That's just the way with mergers, though: we don't attend to
| differences that are unimportant in our personal grammars
| except through conscious striving. I'm the same way with
| marry/merry/Mary: I know there are people who say these
| differently, but even if I'm talking to someone who does, those
| words are all the same to me. The other speaker may be giving
| me one of three distinct tokens by their interpretation, but
| whichever one it is I interpret it as one of a set of identical
| triplets and rely on context to tell which meaning was meant.
|
| Or to give another example: many speakers where I grew up
| (Pittsburgh) reduce the diphthongs in "tire" and "tower" so
| that both of these words sound like "tar." In other words,
| three words share the same token. But I've never misinterpreted
| a strong-accented Yinzer's "tar" as "tire," "tower" as "tar,"
| etc. That doesn't mean a Texan would be wrong to say that some
| of us pronounce these words all the same: we do.
| meepmorp wrote:
| The people that study this kind of thing spend a lot of time
| listening to and transcribing human speech. Plus, you can see
| the vowel formants in a spectrogram of the audio.
| Zircom wrote:
| I don't think he's saying he can differentiate how they say it,
| rather that given the context of the situation he's never
| mistakenly given someone a pin when they were asking for a pen,
| and vice versa.
| quercusa wrote:
| This has been a source of much amusement for my wife. If I'm very
| intentional I can force a distinction between 'pin' and 'pen' but
| it's not at all natural.
|
| I found this really interesting: _The most important thing to
| notice about the pin-pen merger is that it only happens before
| nasals. This means that "pit" and "pet" are unaffected by the
| merger. Only "n" and "m" are really affected, since there are not
| many words ending in "eng"._
| twic wrote:
| What happens if you put on, say, a Boston accent? Do the words
| naturally sound different then?
| canadianfella wrote:
| Where are you from? I've never heard someone do this.
| Cd00d wrote:
| Yeah, I have a Colorado accent, and pen=pin, and chemistry is
| pronounced "kimestry". People from the NorthEast always notice
| and mock.
| bloak wrote:
| There are not many words ending in "eng", but there's one
| starting with "eng", and it happens to be pronounced like
| "ing": "English".
| Terretta wrote:
| Are you suggesting for you "enter-" and "inter-" are _ent_
| irely _int_ ermingled?
|
| From South of Mason Dixie line and anecdata of one, but don't
| pronounce pen like pin or English like Ingrid (or -ing).
|
| // Of course the beginnings and endings make one think of big
| endian and little Indian.
| ksenzee wrote:
| I do not have the pen/pin merger (raised in the Seattle
| area), and I do not pronounce "enter" and "inter" the same,
| but I do pronounce English as if it were Inglish. I think
| that word is an exception.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| And was once pronounced "Ang" :)
| pschuegr wrote:
| Still pretty close in the German pronounciation.
| majormajor wrote:
| Engineering, interestingly, is not pronounced like that.
| kradroy wrote:
| What's puzzling to me is that I'm from South Florida while my
| parents are from the South, of which S Florida is not a part.
| They have the pin-pen merger. However, they are distinct for
| me. I've always wondered how much of a role parents' speech
| patterns vs. peers' and teachers' play in phonological
| development.
| quercusa wrote:
| I had a friend in high school who was from Long Island. I
| think talking to him pulled my speech patterns less Southern.
|
| But if I'm talking to my mom on the phone, it all comes back.
| 8fGTBjZxBcHq wrote:
| Code switching. Super common with southerners living
| outside the south in my experience. We all have various
| degrees we let the accents out depending on who we're
| talking to.
|
| I can almost completely hide it at work if I want but I let
| some through bc people like a little. If I talked to my
| coworkers the way I talk to my siblings though it would be
| a disaster because of prejudice around our dialect.
| quercusa wrote:
| I didn't expect it to be automatic!
| silicon2401 wrote:
| According to Prof. Robert Sapolsky, children are the
| innovators of language, and children speak like their peers.
| A famous example is a sign language spontaneously invented by
| deaf schoolchildren in Child (iirc). The sign language
| persisted, but after a couple of generations the original
| generation couldn't even understand the way the new
| schoolchildren spoke. Children are adaptable and innovative,
| and both learn and invent new speech. In contrast, adults
| tend to be rather ossified in their speech and don't change
| with the times (generally).
| rjbwork wrote:
| Speaking of Sapolsky - his lectures from his Human
| Behavioral Biology course at Stanford are on youtube and
| they are fantastic.
| silicon2401 wrote:
| Exactly what I was referencing. Excellent series; I
| watched/listened to them maybe 4 years ago and couldn't
| stop. Honestly better than any college course I took
| myself by far
| dzdt wrote:
| I could not distinguish pin/pen as a child but learned to later
| in life. Another such pair for me was bowl/bull. I still dont
| distinguish marry/Mary/merry though I have been told others do.
| monktastic1 wrote:
| If you pronounce the letter "a" you'll find that it's a
| diphthong. While pronouncing Mary, you can start the "r" either
| sooner or later in the transition of the "a" sound that
| precedes it.
| swsieber wrote:
| I grew up in Wisconsin. The local accent to to make a's before
| g's long. So the a in bag, dagger, dragon, wagon, etc. It took
| me until college to realize that people from other areas
| couldn't distinguish between "beg" and "bag" when I said it.
| And once I did realize it, it took me a while to differentiate
| between bag as I said it, and bag as most people say. And yet
| longer to fix my pronounciation.
| Macha wrote:
| It lists the south of ireland (though it's unclear if the
| author actually just means "not Northern Ireland" by this, as
| I'd consider it a "western" feature to have thick accents, as
| does his source) as a possible influence on this. Of the
| examples given:
|
| * Pin/Pen - Totally distinct * Marry/Merry/Mary - Mary ~=
| Merry, totally distinct from Marry. * Been/Bin - I never
| thought about this, but even I say "How've you bin", rather
| than "How've you been" * Again/Agin - It's a stereotypical
| elderly farmer accent, but I think even current elderly farmers
| I know don't have it, so maybe it belongs to a couple
| generations before that, or even more rural areas.
|
| Some of the videos of elderly Irish people the article
| mentioned:
|
| https://youtu.be/GT2OVUY2gZY?t=6 - "Shearing sheep, dipping
| sheep, roasting? sheep, correcting them down off the mountain"
| - I mean, there's definitely less distinction between how he
| says sheep with ship, compared to how I would do that or the
| interviewer does.
| ravi-delia wrote:
| I have never in my life been able to say marry/Mary/merry
| different from each other. It just makes me feel like I'm
| trying to do a bad accent.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| I can't figure out how I'd even say those differently!
| Anybody got a link to an example?
| rossitter wrote:
| For speakers without the merger, marry:merry:Mary as
| mat:met:mate.
|
| If you didn't grow up with the distinction (as I didn't),
| you may find it easy to enough to notice the difference--
| particularly between marry (~mat) and the other two--when
| listening to someone without the merger say each word one
| immediately after the other. "Implementing" this knowledge
| when listening to the same person speak naturally is
| another thing altogether.
|
| It's very hard to acquire new phonological rules as an
| adult, no less in your first language than a second one.
|
| An audio example:
| https://forvo.com/word/merry_mary%2C_marry_me/#en
| jsmith45 wrote:
| I'm not sure I always clearly distinguish between the
| three of them. My "merry" is most certainly not normally
| the same vowel as "met" (it is a hybrid that vowel sound
| and some other one). Neither is my "Mary" reliably the
| same sound as "mate". I think my "marry" normally comes
| closest to the vowel sound of "mat", but I'm pretty sure
| it generally is not all the way there. (Although it can
| be, especially if I am trying to enunciate clearly). Over
| all I'm pretty sure I have at least two and possibly
| three disguisable vowels (with Merry and Mary probably
| the merged ones if it is only two) among pronunciation of
| all three. If I have three vowel sounds they they are
| allowed to vary enough that there is overlap between the
| pronunciations I will produce.
|
| That is the awkward thing with vowel sounds. While
| linguists specify a matrix of vowel sounds, a lot of
| people use vowel sounds that land in between them, and
| the sounds are not just exactly the same every time, but
| have some level of variation between them.
|
| And of course, thing probably differ with word stress, as
| vowel sounds often do in English. Not sure how they vary
| though.
| rossitter wrote:
| > While linguists specify a matrix of vowel sounds, a lot
| of people use vowel sounds that land in between them
|
| Definitely, but this is equally true of mat, met, and
| mate.
|
| As for marry/merry/Mary, there are speakers with a
| partial merger. Usually they maintain a distinction
| between "marry" and the other two. That does not discount
| the fact that there are English speakers who feel
| (rightly) that the strength of the difference between
| these three in their own dialect is equal to the strength
| of the difference between mat, met, and mate in most
| dialects.
|
| When it comes to mergers more broadly, many speakers who
| grow up with distinctions that some of their neighbors
| don't make will wind up falling into the nebulous middle
| ground you're describing. There's a cognitive burden
| placed on someone who consistently distinguishes sounds
| that others in their community do not, because the
| speaker who makes the distinction will regularly
| misinterpret what they hear out of the mouths of others.
| ("Wait, did they just say 'Mary'? Oh, no, it must have
| been 'marry.'") This is true even when there can be no
| confusion over homophones: "What does 'fahl' mean? Oh,
| they must have meant 'fall.'" This is one mechanism that
| makes it quite easy for a vowel merger to spread.
| Speakers are conditioned not to pay too much attention to
| phonological differences that are not a part of the
| grammar of others in their social circle.
| moshmosh wrote:
| All I can think of is pronouncing "marry" and "Mary" as
| "mar" (as: to damage) rather than as "men" (as "merry men",
| where the "me" parts are pronounced the same) but if I try
| to do that it comes off, to my Midwestern American ear, as
| _very_ rural-sounding.
| kelnos wrote:
| I do say all three differently. It's hard to write out the
| differences, but:
|
| marry: the 'a' as in 'apple'
|
| mary: the 'ar' is pronounced like the word 'air'
|
| merry: the 'e' as in 'elephant'
|
| Not sure if this does a great job illustrating it, since if
| the examples I chose also sound the same to you, it won't
| work. To me, they are distinct, but they aren't hugely
| different.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| I (en-gb native) struggle to see how you'd pronounce them
| the same! Accents amuse me.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| An old friend and co-worker from southern Ohio has an amusing
| accent which I always ribbed him about. "Pin" and "pen" are
| indistinguishable, as are "color" and "collar", and "Dell" and
| "Dale".
|
| The last one was caused some communications difficulties when we
| were dealing with a Customer contact named Dale and also dealing
| with technical support from Dell simultaneously.
| adamrezich wrote:
| anyone who's interested in American English accents/dialects
| should check out https://aschmann.net/AmEng/ it's a bit clunky
| and old-school as far as websites go but there's a lot of good
| information there
| mc32 wrote:
| I make the distinction as do most native speakers I know.
| however... it's probably as weird to the people who don't
| distinguish it as is the rider/writer distinction[1] some people
| make on the "i" sound in those words whereas I don't make a
| distinction.
|
| "writer": /raIt@/ - /raIt@/ - [raIr@]
|
| "rider" : /raId@/ - /raI:d@/ - [raI:r@]
|
| [1]https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/4103/the-
| wri...
| jsmith45 wrote:
| Is that distinction just talking about vowel sound? Because
| those words are quite distinct to me because the "d" and the
| "t" remain entirely distinct sounds.
|
| I'm not sure about the vowel sound. There might be a slight
| distinction (not one I can easily recognize if it is there), or
| might not.
| mc32 wrote:
| Yes it's a vowel distinction, longer and kind of ascending
| tone quality (like when asking a question). Intervocalically
| d's and t's sound the same in North American English unless
| you're enunciating them on purpose to make a bigger
| distinction.
| superfamicom wrote:
| I'm from Nashville, TN and live in Seattle, WA and recall one
| particular instance on a date here when some girl was trying to
| get snippy & sassy about the "pen" vs "pin" issue. She and many
| other people here, and generally outside of the southern states,
| immediately equate the accent with ignorance. Which makes
| everyone adopting "y'all" more casually now really funny and
| weird to see, like are you mocking it or celebrating it?
| minedwiz wrote:
| IDK if this is everyone, but I, as a native English speaker
| raised in Canada, use it because English doesn't have a better
| 2nd person plural pronoun (think German "ihr").
| apendleton wrote:
| I think "y'all" is becoming more common at least in part out of
| an interest to avoid "you guys," which people perceive to be
| overly gendered. I notice (in my own speech and others')
| "folks" replacing "guys" in other contexts, for the same
| reason. The fact that both make everyone sound a little more
| casual, and a little more southern, is probably mostly a side
| effect -- general American English just doesn't have obvious
| gender-neutral words to fill those semantic functions.
| gibolt wrote:
| The Caught-Cot merger is another interesting language transition
| taking place right now: https://youtu.be/EaYZljTlCUo
|
| As for Pen, there are plenty of people who pronounce it pEEn,
| this is understandable to no one
| meepmorp wrote:
| Mary, merry, marry is also interesting. There's every pairwise
| variant, all 3, and no merger going on in various parts of the
| US, iirc.
| MockObject wrote:
| I wonder if the lack of such mergers is evidence that the New
| York City accent is the closest to the original English.
| ncmncm wrote:
| There is no such thing as "original English". At most there are
| snapshots taken of mainstream English, or of some offshoot,
| from some past moment, since evolving more slowly. The greatest
| variety of forms and accents is found in England, Scotland, and
| Wales, far exceeding variation in all the colonies combined.
|
| English tabloid newspapers have absurdly popular columns
| peeving about some abominable usage in one or other colony
| that, _in every case_ , originated in mainland England and was
| very common typically between 400 and 100 years ago, and just
| fell out of fashion there. English peeving, thus, always turns
| out to be complaints that colonies do not slavishly follow
| London fashions.
|
| Yosemite Sam represents a snapshot of Victorian English.
| not2b wrote:
| The cot-caught merger is another interesting one, but the lines
| for that one are more odd. I grew up in Maryland and say "cot"
| and "caught" differently; my native Californian wife says them
| both the same. We have a friend named Don and a friend named
| Dawn; she pronounces both names the same.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Pineapple-Apple-Pen suddenly took on a new dimension for me (en-
| gb); so, like, for some people it's pronounced "pin apple apple
| pin"!?!?
| rossitter wrote:
| No, this merger only affects the vowel in "pen," not "pine." So
| it would be "pineapple apple pin."
| hermitcrab wrote:
| My wife is from New Zealand. They pronounce 'pen' as 'pin' and
| 'pin' as (something like) 'pun'. So their pronunciations have
| shifted, rather than merged. See also:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift
| smcl wrote:
| Ah no vowel conversation is complete without mentioning how
| they work in NZ accent :D I loved Flight of the Conchords
| (strongly recommend it for anyone who likes deadpan comedy)
| there's a funny bit similar to the pin/pen example:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRdg1MOYxHo
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