memo

[fox]

to: everyone
from: fox

please pronounce the word tour correctly. the vowel is the same as the vowel in lure, not the vowel in lore. (the same is true of sure, by the way -- it is not pronounced the same way as shore.) i know it's spelled just like four, which really does rhyme with lore -- sorry about that. but, please, from this language, what did you expect?

thank you.

Comments

[wholenother.livejournal.com]

Are you sure that really holds true nation-wide (I won't even ask about other anglophones)? I mean, language is constructed through use....

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

i haven't posted a Memo since you've been here, have i. :-)

what i'm saying is, if it's not that way nation-wide, it should be. i'm tired of hearing "tore", and i want it to stop.

[smiles sweetly]

What's wrong with variety?

[wholenother.livejournal.com]

But I'd rather you than the Texans decide what should be... Could you please stop "y'all"?

Re: What's wrong with variety?

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

i could send a memo requesting (or demanding) the cessation of "y'all", but i'm not going to. not all use of it, anyway; it should not be used in formal situations, and it should never be used in the possessive (y'all's) or the singular (which defeats its purpose), but it does have its place. right alongside you'uns and youse and you lot. huzzah for the second-person plural.

Re: What's wrong with variety?

[wholenother.livejournal.com]

"Youse guys" is my favorite.

Oh, "y'all's" hurts!

"Y'all" to refer to two people -- that's "you both" or "both of you," buddies! -- upsets me. To refer to only one person? I shudder at the thought. But it happens.

4PPM used "fora" instead of "forums" in class the other day. Made me so happy I had to interrupt the class to cheer him on! Teehee!

Okay, that's enough from me.

[reginagiraffe]

I don't pronounce it either of those two ways. Two-ar. Does that make me a philistine? *g*

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

no. putting a little syllabic weight on a resonant (in this case, the "r") has never been a crime, and your tonic vowel is still the vowel in "two". so you officially have my permission (which is worth this much [.] [ggg]) to continue pronouncing "tour" as you've been doing.

:-D

[wivern.livejournal.com]

Yes! Thank you ma'am.

Now can we start a drive to stop this abominable overuse and misuse of like? Please.

[bougrelasxiv.livejournal.com]

yes, but how do you dictate that one pronounces lure?

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

duh. it rhymes with tour.

boor and bore are a minimal pair. tour has the same vowel as the first syllable of thurium. etc.

feh.

[bougrelasxiv.livejournal.com]

well, silly me

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

:-)

[king-chiron.livejournal.com]

There's a correct pronunciation? Seriously, I thought the linguistics view was that all pronunciation were equally valid.

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

foofy linguistic answer: "valid" is a prescriptive word, and we don't like to use it any more than is absolutely necessary. any pronunciation produced and understood by native speakers is considered to be -- used and understood by native speakers.

this gets a little fluffy after a point. there are standards, no matter what the descriptivists say. now, the standard variety of a language may not be "better" than non-standard varieties, in a value-judgment sort of way, but yeah, there's a standard. if nothing else, there's a dialect that's spoken more widely and/or by a larger percentage of the population than any other. so the pronunciations and sentence structures observed in the most common or standard dialect are often considered "correct".


but what i was going for here was the Fox Is Getting Irritated answer. :-D

[king-chiron.livejournal.com]

So it all comes down to a pronunciation popularity contest?

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

that's one way of looking at it, i suppose.

[darthrami.livejournal.com]

I'm happy to say that I've been saying "tour" that way for year, but that's really simply more of a byproduct of my spending far too much time listening to Canadian Musicians.