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Wouldn't someone from Pittsburgh pronounce them the same way too?
I'm not from Pittsburgh, although I lived here for the past 12 years now. My family is originally from the Philadelphia area, and I grew up in Southwestern Connecticut near NYC.
That pet-pat thing is called the "Reverse-Northern Cities Vowel Shift", where for = far, far = for, pet = pat etc. I remember the first time I heard that phenomenon was with a guy from NYC who said to me once something like:" can I gat you anything?" (this was years ago). This has crept into younger speakers' accents here in California (not the for-far thing, which seems to have hit its peak in the St. Louis area). My favorite spoof of a St. Louisian goes like: "How for are you going to drive your Fard truck?"
I don't know if there's a term that's "Reverse NCVS". Rather differing shifts like California Vowel Shift happened independently and for different reasons.
However both NCVS and CVS have very Irish characters or at least reminiscent. NCVS has similar short U vowels to most Irish dialects while CVS has similar short A and short E vowels similar to Ulster dialects. An NCVS person says "Dublin" in a very Irish/Northern English way whereas someone with a Canadian Vowel Shift says "Belfast" in a very Ulster like way.
Also I do want to point out that I don't believe far and for are pronounced differently in St. Louis. I think they merge but I could be wrong. Either way pronouncing for like far and forest, orange, form, etc like farest, arange, and farm is also Irish. Obviously these come from different Irish dialects but it shows that the Irish had more than a little influence on American English.
Also, to go back to to the discussion, the caught-cot merger on the other hand is Scottish in origin it is believed. From my understanding most English do not merge those two. I know that in northern Appalachia (Steeler nation), their pronunciation is exactly like the Scottish one whereas in Boston it is a slightly more open mouth merger. In Minnesota the merger takes on a sound that sounds like the letter A with a very open mouth (something like how a South English person might say cat). This particular Upper Midwest sound might be Irish in origin as far as vowel quality. What these vowel mergers and shifts show us is that the Irish and the Scots had more than just a little to do with how Americans speak.
If you ask me, American English is just rhotic RP with an Irish intonation and a few Scottish vowel mergers. In Ulster English there is an intonation where your inflection goes up at the end of a sentence which is not only common across the US (as opposed to the monotone English of England), but it also stereotypical of the American English speaking West Coast in general. I do believe that in inflection we as Americans are more Irish influenced. Even the areas of England where the Irish and other Celtic peoples had more influence do you hear more "American" sounding dialects.
Last edited by EddieOlSkool; 02-21-2017 at 07:04 AM..
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