Yinglish survey, passing it on from chanaleh (without the doo-dah

[rhu]

There's an interesting survey being conducted on the degree to which Yiddish linguistic forms are blending into English. It's not terribly long, and they need participation both from Jews and davka from non-Jews whose vocabulary may have absorbed certain words from us. (And I just skewed the results --- so ignore one word in the previous sentence. :-)

Comments

[chanaleh.livejournal.com]

Hee!

BTW, that was us playing Keesdrow at the Eureka! word games event Tuesday night. I was having an "um, is this where I re-introduce myself, and if so how?" moment, sorry. :-)

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

Keesdrow... which one was that? The one with the pegs?

And as for your "sorry", I'll double it: I didn't even get as far as recognizing you! But in my defense, I was trying to quickly survey the games that were out before rejoining my family. Then I got sucked into playing that other word-search game, which was not a good use of time.

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

I had a problem with one of their questions specifically (the pronunciation of the vowel question), but I filled it out. :-)

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

Yes, there were several pronunciation questions where I had to settle for "closest match"

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Speaking as a linguist, I'm a little mistrustful of survey questions that ask you to judge your own vowels. Hell, I'm trained in this, and I'm not positive whether I distinguish "Mary" and "merry"--I know I can, so pronouncing them while taking the survey isn't helpful, and I'm not sure what I do in casual speech.

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

There weren't enough choices -- the two choices offered were extremes, and the vowel in my idolect is between the two extremes.

That said, I can say for sure that, in my idiolect, "Mary," "merry," and "marry" are all different.