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The Pin-Pen Merger (2020)
- bradrn 5y agoEnglish went through plenty of similar changes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_English_vowels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Englis.... The full list is pretty interesting to read!
- rhombocombus 5y agoThis is one of the few tells that I am from the south when I speak. If I am talking to someone from the mid-atlantic, where pin-pen is still strictly differentiated it can lead to some interesting confusion!
- AbsoluteDestiny 5y agoReally good article. For those interested in this sort of thing, wired did a pretty good series on accents in the US recently on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1KP4ztKK0A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1KP4ztKK0A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsE_8j5RL3k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsE_8j5RL3k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw7pL7OkKEE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw7pL7OkKEE
- quercusa 5y agoThis has been a source of much amusement for my wife. If I'm very intentional I can force a distinction between 'pin' and 'pen' but it's not at all natural. I found this really interesting: The most important thing to notice about the pin-pen merger is that it only happens before nasals. This means that "pit" and "pet" are unaffected by the merger. Only "n" and "m" are really affected, since there are not many words ending in "eng".
- canadianfella 5y agoWhere are you from? I’ve never heard someone do this.
- kradroy 5y agoWhat's puzzling to me is that I'm from South Florida while my parents are from the South, of which S Florida is not a part. They have the pin-pen merger. However, they are distinct for me. I've always wondered how much of a role parents' speech patterns vs. peers' and teachers' play in phonological development.
- quercusa 5y agoI had a friend in high school who was from Long Island. I think talking to him pulled my speech patterns less Southern. But if I'm talking to my mom on the phone, it all comes back.
- 8fGTBjZxBcHq 5y agoCode switching. Super common with southerners living outside the south in my experience. We all have various degrees we let the accents out depending on who we're talking to. I can almost completely hide it at work if I want but I let some through bc people like a little. If I talked to my coworkers the way I talk to my siblings though it would be a disaster because of prejudice around our dialect.
- quercusa 5y agoI didn't expect it to be automatic!
- silicon2401 5y agoAccording to Prof. Robert Sapolsky, children are the innovators of language, and children speak like their peers. A famous example is a sign language spontaneously invented by deaf schoolchildren in Child (iirc). The sign language persisted, but after a couple of generations the original generation couldn't even understand the way the new schoolchildren spoke. Children are adaptable and innovative, and both learn and invent new speech. In contrast, adults tend to be rather ossified in their speech and don't change with the times (generally).
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- bloak 5y agoThere are not many words ending in "eng", but there's one starting with "eng", and it happens to be pronounced like "ing": "English".
- Terretta 5y agoAre you suggesting for you “enter-“ and “inter-“ are entirely intermingled? From South of Mason Dixie line and anecdata of one, but don’t pronounce pen like pin or English like Ingrid (or -ing). // Of course the beginnings and endings make one think of big endian and little Indian.
- ksenzee 5y agoI do not have the pen/pin merger (raised in the Seattle area), and I do not pronounce "enter" and "inter" the same, but I do pronounce English as if it were Inglish. I think that word is an exception.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y agoAnd was once pronounced "Ang" :)
- pschuegr 5y agoStill pretty close in the German pronounciation.
- KMag 5y ago> Still pretty close in the German pronounciation[sic]. Well... I don't find it so surprising that the home of Anglia and the Angles hasn't changed its pronunciation of Angle-land as much. Some mercenaries (if you believe Bede) consisting of Angles from Anglia, Saxons from Lower Saxony, and Jutes from Jutland crossed the channel to fight for various Celtic rulers following the power vacuum left by the Romans leaving Britain. The mercenaries eventually took over part of it, and that part became known as Angle-land. (Of course, this is a gross oversimplification.) The descendants of the mercenaries became known as Anglo-Saxons (not enough Jutes, I guess). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxon_settlement_of_Britain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxon_settlement_of_Brit...
- Cd00d 5y agoYeah, I have a Colorado accent, and pen=pin, and chemistry is pronounced "kimestry". People from the NorthEast always notice and mock.
- twic 5y agoWhat happens if you put on, say, a Boston accent? Do the words naturally sound different then?
- mc32 5y agoI make the distinction as do most native speakers I know. however... it's probably as weird to the people who don't distinguish it as is the rider/writer distinction[1] some people make on the "i" sound in those words whereas I don't make a distinction. “writer”: /ɹaɪtɚ/ → /ɹaɪtɚ/ → [ɹaɪɾɚ] “rider” : /ɹaɪdɚ/ → /ɹaɪːdɚ/ → [ɹaɪːɾɚ] [1]https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/4103/the-writer-rider-distinction https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/4103/the-wri...
- jsmith45 5y agoIs that distinction just talking about vowel sound? Because those words are quite distinct to me because the "d" and the "t" remain entirely distinct sounds. I'm not sure about the vowel sound. There might be a slight distinction (not one I can easily recognize if it is there), or might not.
- mc32 5y agoYes it’s a vowel distinction, longer and kind of ascending tone quality (like when asking a question). Intervocalically d’s and t’s sound the same in North American English unless you’re enunciating them on purpose to make a bigger distinction.
- dzdt 5y agoI could not distinguish pin/pen as a child but learned to later in life. Another such pair for me was bowl/bull. I still dont distinguish marry/Mary/merry though I have been told others do.
- ravi-delia 5y agoI have never in my life been able to say marry/Mary/merry different from each other. It just makes me feel like I'm trying to do a bad accent.
- EvanAnderson 5y agoI can't figure out how I'd even say those differently! Anybody got a link to an example?
- moshmosh 5y agoAll I can think of is pronouncing "marry" and "Mary" as "mar" (as: to damage) rather than as "men" (as "merry men", where the "me" parts are pronounced the same) but if I try to do that it comes off, to my Midwestern American ear, as very rural-sounding.
- rossitter 5y agoFor speakers without the merger, marry:merry:Mary as mat:met:mate. If you didn't grow up with the distinction (as I didn't), you may find it easy to enough to notice the difference—particularly between marry (~mat) and the other two—when listening to someone without the merger say each word one immediately after the other. "Implementing" this knowledge when listening to the same person speak naturally is another thing altogether. It's very hard to acquire new phonological rules as an adult, no less in your first language than a second one. An audio example: https://forvo.com/word/merry_mary%2C_marry_me/#en https://forvo.com/word/merry_mary%2C_marry_me/#en
- jsmith45 5y agoI'm not sure I always clearly distinguish between the three of them. My "merry" is most certainly not normally the same vowel as "met" (it is a hybrid that vowel sound and some other one). Neither is my "Mary" reliably the same sound as "mate". I think my "marry" normally comes closest to the vowel sound of "mat", but I'm pretty sure it generally is not all the way there. (Although it can be, especially if I am trying to enunciate clearly). Over all I'm pretty sure I have at least two and possibly three disguisable vowels (with Merry and Mary probably the merged ones if it is only two) among pronunciation of all three. If I have three vowel sounds they they are allowed to vary enough that there is overlap between the pronunciations I will produce. That is the awkward thing with vowel sounds. While linguists specify a matrix of vowel sounds, a lot of people use vowel sounds that land in between them, and the sounds are not just exactly the same every time, but have some level of variation between them. And of course, thing probably differ with word stress, as vowel sounds often do in English. Not sure how they vary though.
- MockObject 5y agoI wonder if the lack of such mergers is evidence that the New York City accent is the closest to the original English.
- ncmncm 5y agoThere is no such thing as "original English". At most there are snapshots taken of mainstream English, or of some offshoot, from some past moment, since evolving more slowly. The greatest variety of forms and accents is found in England, Scotland, and Wales, far exceeding variation in all the colonies combined. English tabloid newspapers have absurdly popular columns peeving about some abominable usage in one or other colony that, in every case, originated in mainland England and was very common typically between 400 and 100 years ago, and just fell out of fashion there. English peeving, thus, always turns out to be complaints that colonies do not slavishly follow London fashions. Yosemite Sam represents a snapshot of Victorian English.
- Y_Y 5y agoIt's funny that the author couldn't understand modern Irish farmers well enough to look for this effect. It absolutely does exist in the south-west of the country, and is not limited to farmers. It's not ubiquitous by any means, but it's completely unremarkable to anyone who's spent much time there. (Maybe I can have a startup that transcribes videos with strong dialects/accents.)
- smcl 5y agoI think the reason they've come to the conclusion it's a farmer thing is related to the included image of "Mikey Joe O'Shea" - a sheep farmer that went semi-viral for having a very thick accent: https://www.irishpost.com/entertainment/irish-farmers-go-viral-after-tv-news-appeal-for-missing-sheep-117703 https://www.irishpost.com/entertainment/irish-farmers-go-vir... The funny thing is, while the accent is indeed strong that is not IMO what makes what he says difficult to comprehend. He phrases what he says in a way that might be a bit unusual for folks like me (a Scot) so we don't immediately process what he says: "Well there's 45 sheep missing, like. And the(re's) lambs and everything with the sheep. That's come out to a nice bit of money, like. Be done about it? Nothing" Really cool accent though. I couldn't make out what his neighbour said immediately after when he points over to a hill in the distance. I think (hope?) that's gaelic because I couldn't make out a single word. He goes on to talk completely clearly in English about how it's a bit better when you have a good dog to protect the sheep.
- Y_Y 5y agoYa, it's Irish (aka Irish Gaelic aka Gaeilge). He's just saying the up on the mountain is where the sheep used to be. Not the clearest diction though.
- EvanAnderson 5y agoAn old friend and co-worker from southern Ohio has an amusing accent which I always ribbed him about. "Pin" and "pen" are indistinguishable, as are "color" and "collar", and "Dell" and "Dale". The last one was caused some communications difficulties when we were dealing with a Customer contact named Dale and also dealing with technical support from Dell simultaneously.
- adamrezich 5y agoanyone who's interested in American English accents/dialects should check out https://aschmann.net/AmEng/ https://aschmann.net/AmEng/ it's a bit clunky and old-school as far as websites go but there's a lot of good information there
- hermitcrab 5y agoMy wife is from New Zealand. They pronounce 'pen' as 'pin' and 'pin' as (something like) 'pun'. So their pronunciations have shifted, rather than merged. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift
- smcl 5y agoAh no vowel conversation is complete without mentioning how they work in NZ accent :D I loved Flight of the Conchords (strongly recommend it for anyone who likes deadpan comedy) there's a funny bit similar to the pin/pen example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRdg1MOYxHo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRdg1MOYxHo
- rgoulter 5y agoAs an NZer, I learned to appreciate that joke more when I moved overseas. There's also the line "our accents are completely different" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2gii2nenUg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2gii2nenUg
- peterburkimsher 5y agoI knew about the "pen", "pin" before moving to New Zealand, but the one that still gets me is "cache" sounding like "quiche".
- em-bee 5y agoi was thoroughly confused when my friends in NZ asked me to return something to them by throwing it into the litter-box. fortunately no one ever needed six of anything from me, so i was spared any awkward confusion there.
- fernly 5y agoI can't believe the article doesn't even mention New Zealand, where "eh" has become "ih" (or "eeh") right across the vocabulary. It's the most striking thing an American tourist hears from arrival on.
- superfamicom 5y agoI'm from Nashville, TN and live in Seattle, WA and recall one particular instance on a date here when some girl was trying to get snippy & sassy about the "pen" vs "pin" issue. She and many other people here, and generally outside of the southern states, immediately equate the accent with ignorance. Which makes everyone adopting "y'all" more casually now really funny and weird to see, like are you mocking it or celebrating it?
- apendleton 5y agoI think "y'all" is becoming more common at least in part out of an interest to avoid "you guys," which people perceive to be overly gendered. I notice (in my own speech and others') "folks" replacing "guys" in other contexts, for the same reason. The fact that both make everyone sound a little more casual, and a little more southern, is probably mostly a side effect -- general American English just doesn't have obvious gender-neutral words to fill those semantic functions.
- minedwiz 5y agoIDK if this is everyone, but I, as a native English speaker raised in Canada, use it because English doesn't have a better 2nd person plural pronoun (think German "ihr").
- excalibur 5y agoPPAP
- smrq 5y agoI suppose the pen-pen merger would be long pen.
- bitwize 5y agoMy father (LA area native) merges pen and pin. Both sound like "pin" in the midwesternish "standard" American accent. He may have picked it up from his mother (south Texas accent).
- twic 5y ago> When back home in Texas, when asked for a "pen", I've never given someone a "pin" or the other way around. Hol' up. If Texans can distinguish the way other Texans say "pen" and "pin", then surely they aren't actually merged? Yes, the vowel sounds are very similar, and perhaps Yankees can't tell them apart, but they must be different.
- Zircom 5y agoI don't think he's saying he can differentiate how they say it, rather that given the context of the situation he's never mistakenly given someone a pin when they were asking for a pen, and vice versa.
- rossitter 5y agoThe point is that context usually suffices to tell which word is which, same as with wait/weight, time/thyme, and so on. Speakers with the pin-pen merger do pronounce these words the same, and I've known someone who was surprised to learn that I didn't—more than a year into our friendship. Yet he'd heard me talk about our friend Jen and gin, possibly even in the same sentence. He just hadn't noticed that I said them differently. That's just the way with mergers, though: we don't attend to differences that are unimportant in our personal grammars except through conscious striving. I'm the same way with marry/merry/Mary: I know there are people who say these differently, but even if I'm talking to someone who does, those words are all the same to me. The other speaker may be giving me one of three distinct tokens by their interpretation, but whichever one it is I interpret it as one of a set of identical triplets and rely on context to tell which meaning was meant. Or to give another example: many speakers where I grew up (Pittsburgh) reduce the diphthongs in "tire" and "tower" so that both of these words sound like "tar." In other words, three words share the same token. But I've never misinterpreted a strong-accented Yinzer's "tar" as "tire," "tower" as "tar," etc. That doesn't mean a Texan would be wrong to say that some of us pronounce these words all the same: we do.
- meepmorp 5y agoThe people that study this kind of thing spend a lot of time listening to and transcribing human speech. Plus, you can see the vowel formants in a spectrogram of the audio.
- pbhjpbhj 5y agoPineapple-Apple-Pen suddenly took on a new dimension for me (en-gb); so, like, for some people it's pronounced "pin apple apple pin"!?!?
- rossitter 5y agoNo, this merger only affects the vowel in "pen," not "pine." So it would be "pineapple apple pin."
- not2b 5y agoThe cot-caught merger is another interesting one, but the lines for that one are more odd. I grew up in Maryland and say "cot" and "caught" differently; my native Californian wife says them both the same. We have a friend named Don and a friend named Dawn; she pronounces both names the same.
- gibolt 5y agoThe Caught-Cot merger is another interesting language transition taking place right now: https://youtu.be/EaYZljTlCUo https://youtu.be/EaYZljTlCUo As for Pen, there are plenty of people who pronounce it pEEn, this is understandable to no one
- meepmorp 5y agoMary, merry, marry is also interesting. There's every pairwise variant, all 3, and no merger going on in various parts of the US, iirc.