Talk:hallow

Dialectal identification of nonstandard pronunciation

@Stick Daze: Regarding your edit summary, that the "hollow" pronunciation is "NOT 'General American' by any stretch", I think General American is primarily defined by being free of certain phonological features, not by particular words being pronounced a certain way. But I don't know if the mispronunciation is common among people who speak General American, and I suppose "US" works as well since the transcription probably works for many dialects in the US. — Eru·tuon 23:52, 23 October 2019 (UTC)

The precise definition of "General American" is a matter of debate. I take that to mean the closest thing to a "standard" variety of U.S. English speech, lacking any of those features that may identify a speaker as coming from a particular place or social background. Such a variety of English shouldn't include the pronunciations that are not accepted by most educated speakers (like "hollow" for "hallow"); when such a pronunciation is uttered by a supposed speaker of a "standard" variety, it's best regarded as a speech error rather than a more or less legitimate variant. Anyway, if we are to embrace the narrower definition of General American as a collection of neutral phonetic and phonological features, it should be noted that most of what distinguishes present-day North American English dialects is found at the phonetic rather than phonemic level, and the IPA transcriptions provided by wiktionary are (usually) phonemic anyway, so this makes for an argument for dropping the use of the term altogether. Not so in the British isles: Phonemic differentiation there is alive and well (bath-trap split, foot-strut split, r-dropping, etc.) The most important phonemic phenomenon in contemporary American English is the cot-caught merger, which (somewhat ironically) is now generally accepted as "accentless" while many of the speakers who maintain the distinction are perceived as speaking regional varieties (Northern Cities, New York City, the South). But I'm going off on some serious tangent here. Stick Daze (talk) 00:41, 24 October 2019 (UTC)

I guess phonetic features is more accurate; as you say, there aren't as many splits and mergers in American English as in the British Isles. At least Wiktionary's General American transcription system serves well enough for many other American dialects and plenty of other entries already use the ambiguous "US" label. (The "UK" label is much worse.) The funny thing here is that hallow is a rare word, so it would be hard to argue which pronunciation is regarded as correct based on actual usage. Halloween would be easier. — Eru·tuon 03:55, 24 October 2019 (UTC)

Yup. I'd say Halloween/Holloween is a 50-50 split. The hol- pronunciation is now listed by all dictionaries without comment (but it was obelus'ed ÷ in Webster's 3rd). I read somewhere that it's not a recent usage, in spite of being etymologically illogical. In all likelihood, "hallow" as "hollow" came from "holloween" and not the other way around—a sort of back-formation in pronunciation. Stick Daze (talk) 06:04, 24 October 2019 (UTC)