Dave Simmons beat me to it about the Bostonians.
Another reason folks in Boston put what appear to be unnecessary "r"s into their words is to distinguish between homonyms. ou cut wood with a “saw”, but the past tense of “to see” is “sawr”.
Except in the North End, where the past tense is “seen”. i.e. :“I seen him last week.”
During my studies in Italy, I had an art history professor who spoke fluent Italian, but with a thick Bostonian accent. Now in my experience, Italians are very non-snooty when it comes to their language. They are (generally) thrilled when tourists try to speak to them in the local tongue and are patient and encouraging – unlike, oh, say, the French :dubious: . Nonetheless, I couldn’t help but notice quite a few shocked stares on the faces of vendors and passers-by when confronted by this cross-linguistic oddity. Just consider the sheer number of words in the Italian language that end in “a”, and replace them, one and all, with “er”.
Let’s have some pizzer in the piazzer!
The horror, the horror.
Would some Italians just say “pitz?” I noticed that many Italian-Americans drop the last syllable entirely of many words, especially nouns for food objects; mozzarel, spaghet, cannol, lasagn, pasta fagiol, and so on.
This is faux-Americanized-Italian; I don’t even think I heard half of these pronunciations before the Godfather became popular.
All of our Italian friends (actual immigrants) do not pronounce any of those words that way.
In rural Iowa of the 1930’s the only two forms of the verb “to see” were “see” and “seen”.
As in “I see it now.” , “I seen him just a while ago.”, “You shoulda seen him.”
Come to think of it, though, occasionally some ignorant ass would say, “You shoulda saw it. Funniest thing I ever seen.”
“There were birds in the sky
But I never sawr them winging
No, I never sawr them at all
Till there was you.”
-Paul McCartney singing the Beatles’ version of “Till There Was You”
I think you’ve got some terms mixed up here.
“Rhotic” refers to accents in which Rs (particuarly word and syllable-final Rs) are pronounced, such as in Standard American. “Non-rhotic” refers to accents in which such Rs are not pronounced, such as in Standard British. It accounts for confusing pronunciation guides like “‘Sade’ is pronounced ‘Shar-Day.’”
What’s at issue in this thread is not rhoticism but the intrusive R, which is more likely to appear in a non-rhotic accent than in a rhotic one.
Yes; not so much with your specific examples, but many of the Northern Italian dialects drop the final vowels as the language shades toward French: Italian mano, Friulian* man, French main; Italian cane, Friulian cjan, French chien.
Of course, very few Italian-Americans are of Friulian descent, so in this case it’s more likely that they’re trying to hypercorrect and avoid the stereotypical “what’s-a matta you?” type of accent.
*I picked Friulian at random; other northern dialects do the same thing.
Hey, I’m Italian-American, and still trying to figure this one out. When I was a kid, the neighbor kid spoke Sicilian dialect at home with his immigrant grandparents. One time I mentioned playing boccie (lawn bowling) and he thought about the word for a moment until he recognized it: “Oh yeah, you mean bottch’.”
Which is just the opposite of what you’d expect. The stereotypical accent of people from Italy is always adding final vowel sounds to English words that end in consonants. It’s usually transcribed as final “-a”, like Would-a you like-a some-a spaghett? But how Italians actually talk, it isn’t an /a/ sound, it’s more like a quality of tenseness added to final consonants that has an audible release. This isn’t part of English phonology, so we don’t have an accurate way to transcribe it without resorting to arcane IPA characters.
Standard Italian pronunciation does not drop final vowels, but they often become reduced in Southern Italian dialects. “Reduced” in phonetics means pronounced as a short little schwa sound. It’s easy for that schwa to become lost.
It’s Italian-restaurant pronunciation – and they tend to flap the Rs into D-ness and vocalize or otherwise modify the stops –
moozadell for mozzarella
pasta fazool for pasta fagioli
gabbagool for capicolla
This - like the New Yorkism “tuner fish” cited by zeno - is more accurately called “postvocalic intrusive rhotacization.” It doesn’t even need a following vowel to trigger it. It’s a less common form of sandhi than intervocalic, but it still happens in a lot of languages, like Hebrew or Tamil, when the sound of a consonant is altered just because it has a vowel before it.
It’s southern Italian dialectal pronunciation, Neapolitan or Calabrian. Most Italian immigrants to America, including the restaurateurs, came from southern Italy and Sicily. These dialects feature lot of consonant lenition and vowel raising – e.g. the standard Italian word compare /kom pa: re/ ‘godfather of one’s child, close friend’ comes out “goombah” /gum ba:/ in southern dialects.
I can’t answer this offhand, but I’m going to take a quick poll of the people I noticed saying it and get back to you. It might have to be at another slightly drunken party - how does one go around asking people to say “bra”?
I do know that when (who am I kidding, I haven’t had to use that phrase in a while) I say “Take your bra off,” there’s a small but distinct pause between the -a and the o sounds. Perhaps you’re right, and the r is just inserted to smooth the transition between the vowels. Will investigate.
Not sure I completely agree with your definition of compare, an old-fashioned word for companion, or peer. Maybe you’re referring to a dialect variant ? Godfather is padrino (like the movie). Otherwise I agree that the ‘accent’ sounds like Neapolitan, where the penultimate vowel sound of a word is often ‘stretched out’ (vowel raising ?), and the last syllable dropped completely (consonant lenification ?). The softening of the ‘C’ sound to a ‘G’ also sounds like Neapolitan.
I’m struggling. Really. Where are these 'R’s being inserted?
Seriously - this is something which has cropped up before, and I just cannot hear it at all.
I know it is an old song, but listen to Elton John’s “Yellow Brick Road” and tell me if he says “A couple of vodker and tonics to get you on your feet again.”
Believe me, he does say “vodker”.
gorillaman, just listen to any of kennedy’s speaches. esp. the ones that involved cubar and the missiles there.
I’ve always heard it referred to as the “Law of Conservation of Rs” - Rs cannot be created or destroyed, only moved from word to word.
Thus:
Beer -> Beeah
Idea -> Idear
I thought it was just a New Englandah thing, didn’t realize that othah’s did it, too.
Oddly, I have heard this with folks with a certain type of American accent (which I can’t place). As a child in Montana, I often heard folks saying “warsh” for wash. Also “warshinton” for “washington”.
It used to drive me nuts.
In the song The Very Thought OF You by English songwriter Ray Noble there is the line
shows that for Noble, “idea” rhymed with"here".
I grew up mainly in Wisconsin and for the most part, Wisconinites don’t stick extra r’s on too many words.
I was used to people from the New York/New England areas of the country adding r’s to words like pizzer instead of pizza. But I was a bit surprised when I went to college in Minnesota and discovered Minnesotans not only do that but like r’s so much they’ll stick them on your first name if they like you. If your name is Steve you become Stever, or if your name is Keith you become Keither.