Leslie Allen inquires,
> Are you preparing for the Hurricane there in Allie-Bam-Uh  ?

Yes and no. Hurricanes generally lose force as they move inland, although
they continue to kill and cause damage due to floods, tornadoes, falling
trees, and landslides. Some of the worst damage from Gulf hurricanes in
recent years has been in places like Tennessee and Virginia. Most hurricanes
are degraded to tropical storms by the time they reach Tuscaloosa, which is
a 5-hour drive from the coast of Alabama, but we're taking this one more
seriously. So far, the sky just looks weirdly cloudy but the sun is still
breaking through now and then. Today I am preparing by getting papers off
the floor, which may get wet.

I was originally scheduled to collect sand samples for a coastal project
next week, but who knows now? If Ivan matches Frederic, then roads will be
impassable, pecan orchards will be lying on their sides, and a lot of people
who chose to flatten dunes to build condos a few meters away from the shore
will be in shock. Two subspecies of beach mice that were listed as "common"
in the early 1950's will be close to extinction. Again, if it's like
Hurricane Frederic in 1979, then martial law will be imposed for some weeks
after landfall, so don't expect this to be a shelling opportunity.

Getting back to important trivia, 'Alabama' or 'Allie-Bam-Uh' indeed derives
from the tribal name 'Alibamu', which does not mean 'Here we rest' despite
the popular histories.

Linda Bush wrote,
> I noticed at COA the program presenters used three different pronunciation
of the "ae" at the end of the family names, viz. "uh" "long i," and "long
e."  Anybody care to give the correct pronuncaition?

"uh" (schwa) is flatly incorrect and people who use it will have to stop
that right now, because it is ambiguous with other endings like -a.
"long i" is how Cicero would have pronounced it. Acceptable.
"long e", also acceptable, is what happened to "long i" during the English
language's Great Vowel Shift, sometime after the time of Chaucer. All the
long vowels were shifted forward and upward in the mouth and diphthongized
for good measure, except for the vowels that were already as high and front
as they could get, which were diphthongized and sent back to the bottom of
the class. Using current spelling conventions, with > as shorthand for
"became":

oh > oo
oo > ow

ah > ay
ay > ee
ee > I

And so on.

Meanwhile, grammatical endings were simplified and most unstressed vowels at
the ends of words became pronounced in the middle of the mouth as "uh",
spelled "e" and now called 'schwa'. The final schwa was then dropped but the
spelling had already become frozen, so words like "name" that used to be
pronounced with two syllables (NAH-muh) are now pronounced with only one
(NAYM).

English speakers were apparently unaware that their pronunciation was
shifting, or if they were aware, they discounted the old pronunciations as
provincial or lower-class. I suspect that a lot of linguistic shift occurred
as a result of people copying the incorrect usage of royal personages. For
example, when the house of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha inherited the throne of England
a couple of hundred years ago, the English started to pronounce a lot of
words (e.g., ask, castle) with a lovely German broad 'a'. Most Americans
continued to use the older flat 'a' in such words but have been castigated
ever since as mispronouncing them.

Of course, linguistic change continues its merry way in America. English is
spoken in at least four different ways in Tuscaloosa, a city of only 80,000
people, and I can barely understand two of the dialects even after 16 years
here. In one of them, from the west end of town, it's because so many of the
final consonants are dropped. In the other, at the east end, it's because
the diphthongs have further mutated into triphthongs or even tetraphthongs
(ay > ayee > uh-ayee, etc.) but are nonetheless spoken rapidly. Both
dialects are peppered with a few Shakespearean relicts like 'fain',
pronounced 'fin': 'I'm fin to (do something)', meaning 'I want to/intend
to'. These people have no trouble understanding more standard English so I
have to admire them for being bilingual.

People today seem to have no greater awareness that their language is
changing. When I was a child, 'codify' was pronounced 'CO-dify', but
recently, under the influence of British news announcers who seem unaware
that the word derives from 'code', Americans mostly say 'COD-ify'. The
British have lately been considering more and more singular nouns as plural
if they refer to groups of people, as in 'The government have' rather than
'The government has', and this ugly practice has begun to spread here too.
There also seems to be a drift in pronouncing short words spelled with 'oo'
from long oo to short oo to "uh": coot, wood, blood. How do you pronounce
'roof' or 'root'?

All of which goes the long way around to say, it is not likely that everyone
will pronounce words the same way, so why try to make them do so? One might
as well puff in the face of a hurricane.

Andrew K. Rindsberg
Geological Survey of Alabama

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