What has you here today?    work history (html) about me tajik bookmarks
AUGUST, 2005 → ← OCTOBER, 2005

English pronunciation … Louis Prima, New Orleans 24th of September, 2005 POST·MERIDIEM 10:36

Something you may not know—at least I didn’t; the standard English pronunciation of the word “whore” is /hoʴ:/, that is, like the surname “Hoare,” and not the way it’s spelled. The most common Irish pronunciation of it, the one I grew up with and that you’ll often see spelled “hoor” in “cute hoor”, is the expected development from Old English given the relevant sound laws. This makes the American “ho” not the crazy abberration I thought it was, but just a transcription of the standard word in a non-rhotic dialect, like, for example, that of New Orleans.

On a tangent, Louis Prima grew up in New Orleans, and as a result didn’t pronounce his “r”s after vowels; he was also Italian-American, and had that accent. This results in him having an amazingly cool accent to my ears.

Berlin’s fun, if monotonous at the moment, thanks for asking.