How about asking the individual how his/her name is pronounced?
Robin
I asked the linguists at sci.lang about Izzy’s pronunciation. Their replies:
Whatever he’s talking about, it’s not a “NY/NJ area” distinction!!
Find out if there’s a difference between pipe and pight; or between pipe and pime; or between pipe and pibe. I
think maybe the nucleus is a trifle lower before the nasal (either m or n) and before the voiced (either b or
n), rather than before the alveolar (t vs. n). But it’s certainly not phonemic.
i don’t recall having seen a discussion of a split of the phoneme /aj/ into two phonemes, in new york or
elsewhere. however, the literature reports a very large amount of dialectal variation in the realization of /aj/
(a.k.a. /ay/ and /aI/) - as monophthongal [a:], and as a diphthong, with its first element ranging from back to
front and from very low to mid.
there are two ways a phonemic split could develop. one is by “dialect mixture”; a language learner who hears /aj/ words from two different dialects (with different phonetic
realizations) might interpret individual words as having distinct vowels. such a learner might get the vowel of
GUY, HI, BYE, say, from one set of speakers but the vowel of BUY, CRY, DIE, say, from another set.
another possibility is “style mixture”; the language learner gets the vowel for some words from their
informal/casual/fast-speech/
unaccented variants, and the vowel for other words from their occurrence in more formal styles and/or in accented positions. the personal pronoun I, for example, has a
monophthongal variant in casual speech for most english speakers (including those who have diphthongal
/aj/ in words like PIE and FRY); a learner who hears enough of these tokens might well analyze I as actually
monophthongal, and not a rhyme for PIE.
none of this helps with the details for the putatively GUY/BUY contrasting speaker. getting someone without phonetic training to describe articulation is pretty much
hopeless. you’d really have to hear them.
you can get something of a clue, though, if you collect as long a list as possible of words that do rhyme with
GUY and words that do rhyme with BUY. ask about HI, I, BYE, BY, MY and about CRY, DIE, FRY, SIGH, PIE.
then you might try near-rhymes, asking about the vowels of GUY/BUY compared to those of BITE, FIGHT,
SIDE, CRIED, PINE, SIGN, etc.
finally, if you have some idea about the phonetic realizations of other phonemes in this person’s dialect, you
can ask for comparisons between the first part of /aj/ and other vowels: pAd, pOd, fAther, cOme, etc. this is
a more difficult task than the others, and your speaker might not be able to do it.
i’d guess that BUY has a vowel that diverges from a diphthong with a low central-or-back first element (which
occurs in GUY) - either by monophthongization or my raising of the first element to schwa or by fronting of the
first element to digraph/ash. but this is just a guess.
Well, “pipe” versus “pine” could well be an instance of Canadian raising (which is not limited to or, indeed,
common to all Canadian speech). Canadian raising is where /aj/ is pronounced with a schwa or wedge
vowel before a voiceless consonant, that is, [@j] or [Vj]. I’m a bit surprised by the difference in “buy” and “guy,” but maybe the different places of articulation of the two initial consonants have a similar effect.
Funny, that’s my distinction, which I thought was pretty normal in the eastern US.
ishmintingas,
I’m sorry, but your post is too technical for me, though perhaps others may find it useful.
Let me try another example. “Fire” and “hire”. Do you pronounce these the same way? In pronunciation of most people that I know they differ. “Fire” is said as if beginning to say “fight”, but ending with an “er” sound instead of the “t”. “Hire” is pronounced exactly the same as “higher”
Izzy,
There is not the least difference between these sounds for me and for everyone I know. They are the exactly identical sound.
Izzy: I’m not sure what you’re talking about, either, and my accent could be defined as NY/NJ Jewish - I was raised in a non-English speaking country by a father from Manhattan (by way of Teaneck NJ) and a mother from Atlantic City. Considering that that’s all the English I heard growing up (outside of TV), I suppose that my accent is uniquely “pure”. To me, all those words rhyme perfectly.
Pronounciation of Ashkenazic names changes from country to country. In Israel, “Stein” is often pronounced “Shten” - and as you see, the S is usually pronounced “Sh” (thus we have reviews of movies by famed American Jewish director Steven Shpielberg :)) or as Z at the the beginning of names. Thus, an Israeli would write and pronounce “Silverstein” as “Zylbershten”. Wacky.
As to the OP, my mother pronounces the end of “Feinstein” as “STINE”. I’ take her word for it - it’s her maiden name.
So I asked some more people around the office. I have alot of support for guy/buy being different, but none (so far) for hire/fire. Truth is, now that I think about it, that the way I pronounce fire in English is exactly the way it is said in Yiddish. So maybe that’s where I’m getting this from. But I stand firm on guy/buy.
Alessan, the reason those names are pronounced that way in Israel is because they are still using the original pronunciations of those names. The name Silverstein was originally Zilbershtayn, when that name first began to be used. Likewise for Spielberg and the others. Which usage is “wacky” depends on your culture. And here you always said you were an Israeli…
And I don’t think your mother gets the final word on Feinstein. I know several Feinsteins who pronounce it steen.
Actually, Izzy, with “Wacky” I was referring to the differences between the languages and cultures. Being bilingual gives you a fun perspective of things.
Besides, the Israeli pronunciation is different from the Yiddish. Remember, Israelis use the Sephardic pronunciation of Hebrew rather than the Ashkenazic, a faact which changes many European names and words.
I just remembered, when Leonard Bernstein appeared on Sesame Street, Kermit “thee” Frog introduced him as “Leonard Bernsteen.” LB tried to correct him by saying “Bernstine” but Kermit ignored him and kept talking.
Here are some more responses from sci.lang on the question of Izzy’s pronunciation. This may be more comprehensible.
In the dialect I speak (which may be an amalgamation of North Dakota German-American and West Coast) the distinction between the i’s of pipe and pine is that the first starts with the u of but, while the second starts with the a of father.
Sounds like Canadian Raising. Interesting–I’ve been told I have it slightly, but I can’t catch it myself.
I’ve noticed that Canadians typically pronounce the ou of out the way I pronounce that of couch–again, starting with the u of but. Maybe because of the proximity of Canada to North Dakota?
The name “Canadian raising” simply means it’s a familiar phenomenon in Canada, not that it’s either restricted to or universal there. Milwaukee does it, too.
(North Dakota German-American? I’m trying to remember what Lawrence Welk sounded like. He had that accent – it was quite different from any other kind of American speech.)
My paternal great grandmother: Katy Sharpensteen
My father informed me that the original spelling was Sharpenstein and he knew his mother’s parents to be Jewish. He explained that it was changed by officials loading the boat or unloading the boat in order that the sailing/sailed Family WOULD MOST DEFINITELY BE IDENTIFIED AS JEWISH. Has anyone else ever heard this explanation?
Gene Wilder: “It’s Fr-ah-nkenst-ee-n, not Franken-stine.” Classic.
(But what about “Frau Blucher”?)
Shtine. Zombie-shtine!
Any truth to the old rule of thumb I learned somewhere: In German, if two vowels next to each other, emphasize the second vowel?
Unless it’s a jelly donut.
I’m sure, but don’t feel like looking it up, that when “Artur Rubenstein” came up so did the conductor and society man Leonard Bernstein, who for some reason was obnoxious about correcting people to say “stein” not “steen.”
Is the latter less classy? “Too Jewish?”
Perhaps he just wanted people to pronounce his name correctly…
Does anybody say “Een-Steen”? Anybody call themselves that?
Ever have a perfect answer to a thread, and then find out you already posted it sixteen years ago?
Pronounce it “correctly?”…according to who or what? If I happen to be a Jew and not wanting others to know, then I prounounce it s-t-i-n-e however that does not make me less Jewish On the flip side, if I am Jewish and the suffix on my name is written “steen” then there is no way for me to deny my genetics.
Huh?
The Netherlandish master painter Jan Steen is Jewish? Next thing you’ll be telling me the diirector Norman Jewison is.