I was referring to the spreading tendency in American English to lower
the "short e" (as in "bet, met") to a sound like the "a" in "bat, mat"
(a sound represented in the phonetic alphabet by the ligature ae, which
my email can't generate). Like many sound changes, it appears to have
originated with younger females, and is now heard very widely. The
opposite thing happened to "short e" in Australia/New Zealand, where it
was raised to "short i" ("bit, mitt"). It's regularly raised to "short
i" before some "n" in American English ("Inglish") -- in fact by at
least 90% of American speakers. These are not "mispronunciations";
unlike France, we don't have a language academy that decrees the sounds
of our speech, and even the BBC has relaxed its "Received
Pronunciation." If these things didn't happen, we would all be talking
like Chaucer.
Using "I" where the sparse English case system requires "me" is an
example of hypercorrection. People do it because they've been scolded
for saying "My mother and me went to the store," and they get scared of
sounding uneducated. No excuse for hypercorrection in writing -- after
all, we have editors, who even know how to use em dashes -- but there's
no need to object to it in speech. You know what he means. I even know
what "gladiolies" means.
Jane McGary, Portland, Oregon, where the smoke is clearing and I hope
our lungs soon will.
On 9/19/2020 10:08 AM, Valerie Myrick via pbs wrote:
> Jane, would you please give some of examples of what you mean by “the vowel shifts occurring in American English”.
>
> This whole topic is very interesting and I’m afraid I’ve found at least one example of my own mispronunciations.
> My pet peeve: News presenters and newspaper writers who are afraid to use “me” when they should (objective case).
>
> Val
> Sonora, CA
>
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