Another Rabbit Day item in the stew (see my earlier posting today “Rabbit stew 1: Asian soup spoons”), taking off from this Facebook posting by Greg Morrow yesterday (with some editing by me):
In sort of an opposite of the pen–pin merger [AZ: in which syllable-offset /ɛn/, as in pen, and /ɪn/, as in pin, are both realized as [ɪn]], local dialect (including mine) has [vǝnɛlǝ] vanella as the pronunciation of vanilla [vǝnɪlǝ].
(Heard it today in the grocery, and I was like, yes that’s right, wait a second…)
A further comment went on with the idea that this ɪ > ɛ (before l) that gives widespread US vanella was in some way the opposite of the ɛ > ɪ (before n) shift that gives us US midlands inkpin [ɪŋkpɪn] ‘(ink)pen’.
My response:
Whoa there, clever man! I’ll post about this on my blog shortly, but you’re into heavy speculating on the basis of what is an odd fact about one word in American English, vanilla, in which accented [ɪ] before [l] is lowered to [ɛ]. [con GM: specificity to one item]
Now consider the word Manila; I am confident you have [ɪ] and not [ɛ]. Ditto for the noun nil ‘nothing’. If you know about Nilla Wafers, I’m pretty sure you pronounce the name with [ɪ] and not [ɛ], despite the fact that they’re vanilla-flavored. If you’ve heard about the fragrant compound vanillin, you probably pronounce that name with [ɪ] and not [ɛ] too. [con GM: no generalization to similar items]
Meanwhile, you are not alone in what you do with the noun vanilla; millions of Americans, quite possibly the majority, have that pronunciation (and virtually no Brits do). If you’re from the Middle Atlantic region embracing the NYC area, the Philadelphia area, and NJ generally, your unreflecting pronunciation will be van[ɛ]lla, period. This is me, from childhood on, and I’m not changing now; I was stunned when I lived in the UK and discovered that ordinary people, working class and all, everywhere, said van[ɪ]lla and mocked my [ɛ] as some sort of ignorant Americanism. So van[ɪ]lla was one of my transatlantic adjustments; but I had to think about it, every time.
Even better: since I grew up in an area where essentially everybody had vanella, all the time, everybody thought it was the correct pronunciation, and thought that people who said vanilla were showing off some sort of fancy-pants pronunciation. When I asked a teacher why the word was spelled with an I instead of an E, she said that van[ɪ]lla was an old pronunciation, so that the spelling was one of those peculiarities of English spelling you just had to learn
But now the stunner. If you look to lexicographically respectable dictionaries for guidance, they all say that van[ɪ]lla is the only pronunciation, in both the UK and the US. The Merriam-Webster dictionaries say so, the Cambridge dictionaries say so, the Oxford dictionaries (including OED2 and NOAD) say so, American Heritage says so, and there I stopped looking, because I was so pissed off. Had no one even looked at the facts? Apparently not. Were they all reporting on preferred pronunciation from well more than a century ago? Apparently so. So I’ll rant on that first, and then get back to Greg Morrow.
What DARE says. The Dictionary of American Regional English on the word vanilla reports first on its surveys of speakers, done in the mid-20th century, relying especially on older and rural speakers. The summary was: usually ɪlǝ, but also ɛlǝ. Then in reports from various other sources: a 1930s comment that vanella was very common; and a 1985 New York Times Magazine article that maintained that the vast majority of Americans say vanella (well, if you were in NYC, it would have seemed that they did).
This information was apparently disregarded, I suppose in the belief that vanella is just a vulgar error, loutish and uneducated.
But: specificity and no generalization. A bit more from DARE, which tells us that AmE has only three items with ɛl for standard ɪl: vanilla (used of ice cream), Illinois, and milk. So the usage is wildly item-specific.
It’s also true that the three ɛl usages are common in three different areas of the country; they do not vary together.
And, as I pointed out to Greg Morrow for vanella, the ɛl of these items doesn’t generalize to phonetically similar items: the ɛl of vanella hasn’t spread to Manila, or nil, or ill / bill / fill / mill, or Camilla and Willa, or Billy / Willy / Millie / filly, or willow or pillow. The ɛl of Ellinois hasn’t spread to ill or military or affiliative, or the technical linguistics term illative (where it is in fact distinct from the term elative). The ɛl of melk hasn’t spread to ilk, bilk or silk. These three occurrences of ɛl are one-offs.
… And now to get some vanella ice cream.
December 1, 2024 at 6:04 pm |
On Nilla Wafers, from Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nilla_Wafers
December 2, 2024 at 7:12 am |
Fascinating. I cringe when I hear bad pronunciations, like “tore” for “tour”, “eem” for “him”, “noo-kew-ler” and “joo-lery”.
December 2, 2024 at 9:24 am |
(I’m not sure what you intend by the spelling “eem”; if it’s the absence of initial h, that’s just a phenomenon of connected speech throughout the English-speaking world.)
Otherwise, your “bad pronunciations” are all historical innovations in American English, each with its own history. Some are still non-standard and stigmatized (though often quite common): the metathesis of ǝl > lǝ in jewelry, /tur/ > /tɔr/ in tour (meanwhile /pur/ > /pɔr/ in poor has resulted in both pronunciations counting as acceptable). Some are now standard American English: /nju/ > /nu/ in new and nude and the first syllable of nuclear. (NOAD doesn’t even give the /nju/ variant as an alternative, though a British dictionary could never get away with that.) And so on.
But you should ask yourself why you cringe at these pronunciations and why you label them as “bad” (while your pronunciations are “good”). Are you demanding that everyone talk the same way? Why would you do that?
December 2, 2024 at 7:13 am |
I know that one or even two counter-examples are not necessarily significant, but I will point out that neither my husband nor I, both of whom grew up in NYC, has /ɛ/ in vanilla.
December 2, 2024 at 10:41 am |
Well, not counter-examples, but exceptions. And all variation is packed with an assortment of exceptions to generalizations about it.
In this case, you and John might well have taken vanilla speakers as models, or been subject to correction, and anyway the vanella variant was probably less widespread in NYC when you were kids than it is now, so there was more vanilla surrounding you.
You might even have assumed that instances of vanella that came your way were just inadvertent errors, (Of course nobody can accurately recapture small details of their mental states during childhood, so the actual story is inscrutable.)
December 2, 2024 at 10:19 am |
Geoffrey Nathan reports that he tried to comment on vanella, but was defeated by WordPress. Here’s what he wanted to say:
Now, in my 8/11/24 posting “Toto, Tonto, let’s call the whole thing off”, in a section on the song, I note that it was written by George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin for the *1937* film (so, from almost a century ago) Shall We Dance and that it plays on alternative region-, class-, and ethnicity-based pronunciations (for either, neither, potato, tomato, pajamas, laughter, vanilla, sarsaparilla, oysters) — with two of the items (potahto, s’parella) citing invented, unattested, pronunciations that are just there to get rhymes. But largely contrasting American pronunciations with more “elegant” British ones (in either, neither, tomato), certainly the case for vanella. Which no doubt exhibited more variation in the US than it does now, and was probably the object of schoolroom correction — so, as you suggest, might have been “audible” for American speakers, the way the NYC variant ersters was .
https://arnoldzwicky.org/2024/08/11/toto-tonto-lets-call-the-whole-thing-off/
December 3, 2024 at 2:00 pm |
I have to say that I do not recall ever having heard “vanella” in my 30+ years of living in New England (New Hampshire and Massachusetts) nor in my 40+ years of living in the West (northern Utah and southern Arizona). Perhaps I have not been sensitive enough. But other regional differences like “wash” vs “warsh” or aunt (to rhyme with “pant” or “font” or, I have heard, half-way between) have always been obvious.
December 3, 2024 at 2:36 pm |
It’s extremely unlikely that “vanella” has never been uttered in your presence, but it’s entirely possible that you never noticed; indeed, you might not have noticed thousands of instances — because the two variants are very close phonetically and (more important) because the context
vǝn __ lǝ
picks out one (relatively high-frequency) word; if ice cream is the topic, then the vǝ alone is enough to predict that the word that’s coming is (some pronunciation of) vanilla. Top-down processing triumphs.