Word: sounding
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...every country sound and surge of wind
Could his seven-year-old legs, never very sound even in his heyday, stand up for a mile-and-a-quarter...
This little story (there is more to it) was cunningly composed not for sense but for sound. Twelve people picked from various parts of the eastern U. S. read the story aloud to a phonograph. Dr. Walter H. Wilke and Joseph F. Snyder of New York University's Department of Speech played the records to ten audiences, also geographically scattered and totaling about 500 listeners, who were asked whether they recognized the accents, and whether they liked them...
Most thoroughly disliked, most easily located was the proletarian accent of New York City. ("He'd alwiss shoik making gah cherce.") This accent is characterized by a dentalized t (pronounced with the tip of the tongue between the teeth), by an excessively hissing s, by heavy ng sounds (e.g., "making gah" for "making a"); and by closing and diphthongizing certain vowels, so that "ask" sounds like "ay-usk" (or "ay-ust"), and "cough" sounds like "co-uff." The uneducated New Yorker seems to say "shoik" for "shirk" and "cherce" for "choice." Actually he uses the same sound, intermediate between...
...cloak of false colors. The Furtwaengler is a truly magnificent recording, not as literal as the Weingartner, but with tremendous sweep and surge, and recorded beautifully, even though it was issued several years ago. The Furtwaengler is best, but all three are better than Maestro Toscanini's version which sound like the "Hoof Movement" from the "Overture to William Tell...