Wolfe's brilliance or my denseness?

Jerry Friedman · 24 May 2011, 20:59 · from 2011-May.txt.gz

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From: jerry_friedman at yahoo.com (Jerry Friedman)
Date: Tue, 24 May 2011 13:59:49 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) Wolfe's brilliance or my denseness?
In-Reply-To: <SNT123-W48B832F2C89D615C339660CF750 at phx.gbl>
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Message-ID: <100053.89082.qm at web114716.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>

> From: Lee Berman <severiansola at hotmail.com>

> >Jerry Friedman: I'll bet you have no trouble saying "smoke" or "Cass  does" 
>with an /s/.
> >My intuition for "Casdoe" is a /z/, though, like  yours.  I doubt it matters.
> 
> I have no trouble saying "smoke" because  the "s" is not in the middle of the 
>word. I can
> say "Cass does" easily IF I  say it as two separate words. If I say it quickly, 
>as one
> word, the  difficulty returns.

How about "disdain" or "misdirect"?

> I'm not saying the difficulty is inherent in human  tongue function but rather 
>a function of
> my AmE trained tongue and the  linguistic rules it has learned over a lifetime. 
>It only matters 
>
> as the  point of a hypothesis for why non-native speakers of English are more 
>likely to  have caught
> that Cas was Dorcas.                            

As I recall, your point was about the final vowel.  We usually don't make 
nicknames out of final syllables whose vowel is a schwa (though I did know an 
Eric who was sometimes called Rick).  I thought that was a good point.  On the 
other hand, I'd say the final "s" of both "Cas" and "Dorcas" the same way (as 
/s/), so at least for me, the "s" has nothing to do with why I missed that 
connection.  Neither does the pronunciation of "Casdoe".

Jerry Friedman

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