{"id":231,"date":"2018-02-22T18:31:03","date_gmt":"2018-02-22T18:31:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/?p=231"},"modified":"2018-02-23T09:06:15","modified_gmt":"2018-02-23T09:06:15","slug":"a-sorry-excuse-for-surrey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/2018\/02\/22\/a-sorry-excuse-for-surrey\/","title":{"rendered":"A sorry excuse for Surrey"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">It has recently come to my attention that my vowels are weird. This was pointed out to me by a fellow American colleague who declared that, unexpectedly, we do not say <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Surrey <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">the same way, and that my pronunciation has a \u201cweird\u201d vowel. I\u2019ve already experienced confusion more than once from locals when I utter the word, and it\u2019s enough to make me a little self-conscious.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">I was already vaguely aware that Californians do some strange things with vowels. A bit of online digging revealed that as a San Francisco Bay Area native, I can blame my weird vowels on the Northern California vowel shift (outlined by Penny Eckert <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/web.stanford.edu\/~eckert\/vowels.html\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">here)<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">. This sound change is what makes the surfer\u2019s (and my) way of saying <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">duuuude <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">so distinctive (the vowel is fronted). My international friends make fun of the way I say \u201caw, man!\u201d. Here, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">man<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> for me becomes something like \/miyn\/. Even I have to admit it sounds pretty funny.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">I like to think I am relatively aware of linguistic behavior, but as this experience showed me, we as linguists may not be as well-equipped as we think to recognize our own quirks. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It has recently come to my attention that my vowels are weird. This was pointed out to me by a fellow American colleague who declared that, unexpectedly, we do not say Surrey the same way, and that my pronunciation has a \u201cweird\u201d vowel. I\u2019ve already experienced confusion more than once from locals when I utter the word, and it\u2019s enough to make me a little self-conscious. I was already vaguely aware that Californians do some strange things with vowels. A&#8230;<\/p>\n<p class=\"read-more\"><a class=\"btn btn-default\" href=\"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/2018\/02\/22\/a-sorry-excuse-for-surrey\/\"> Read More<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">  Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,24],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-231","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-sound-change"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=231"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":233,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231\/revisions\/233"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=231"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}