Thanks for this interesting info, Jane. I’ll try listening for those changed vowels though I do not have a good “ear”. I was amazed to find that I am saying “Inglish” though at least I have lots of company.
Val
> On Sep 19, 2020, at 11:00 AM, Jane McGary via pbs <pbs@lists.pacificbulbsociety.net> wrote:
>
> I was referring to the spreading tendency in American English to lower the "short e" (as in "bet, met") to a sound like the "a" in "bat, mat" (a sound represented in the phonetic alphabet by the ligature ae, which my email can't generate). Like many sound changes, it appears to have originated with younger females, and is now heard very widely. The opposite thing happened to "short e" in Australia/New Zealand, where it was raised to "short i" ("bit, mitt"). It's regularly raised to "short i" before some "n" in American English ("Inglish") -- in fact by at least 90% of American speakers. These are not "mispronunciations"; unlike France, we don't have a language academy that decrees the sounds of our speech, and even the BBC has relaxed its "Received Pronunciation." If these things didn't happen, we would all be talking like Chaucer.
>
> Using "I" where the sparse English case system requires "me" is an example of hypercorrection. People do it because they've been scolded for saying "My mother and me went to the store," and they get scared of sounding uneducated. No excuse for hypercorrection in writing -- after all, we have editors, who even know how to use em dashes -- but there's no need to object to it in speech. You know what he means. I even know what "gladiolies" means.
>
> Jane McGary, Portland, Oregon, where the smoke is clearing and I hope our lungs soon will.
>
>>
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