Ana and Evangeline are back from their grandmother's.

[conuly]

(I finally set up my wireless again, so I'm totally upstairs while typing. This either rocks or sucks depending on how much computer time you figure I'll have...!)

Their mother hadn't sent Ana's vacation homework up with her, which meant I got stuck with it. That's all right, she just kinda plowed through it. (And yes, I *do* think vacation homework for kindergarten is silly, but I'm told that the other kids in her class have parents who want MORE homework. The mind boggles, let me tell you.)

One of Ana's homeworks (she only has three left for the weekend - the daily "what the weather is" picture, her "my favorite thing I did this week" picture and two sentences, and a math set (they're working with coins) that she didn't want to finish) involved rhyming words. There were four words in each row (in four different rows), three of which rhymed. This was pretty badly done as the non-rhyming word always made a minimal pair with a rhyming word - bug, rug, and rag, for example. It would've been more challenging if they hadn't. But I digress.

The final row had these four words: pin, pen, ten, hen.

Can you see the problem with that? Say the list aloud. If you automatically figure out the problem, gold star! If not, go here. As it happens, I have the pin-pen merger. I think I must have gotten it from my dad, as neither my mother nor sister has it and they used to tease me about it. (Because I didn't get enough of that at school, guys?) I remember sitting in speech (therapy) lessons as a kid, the only year I had actual instruction in those, working it out in my head how weird it was that there was no short-e before n, even when it's written in that way! I literally don't hear it when other people say it unless I'm listening for it, and I feel as though I'm twisting my mouth unnaturally to produce it myself.

So when I saw this I listened with great interest to see what Ana would do.

She carefully read the words (didn't have to sound them out!), and as soon as she got to pin and pen she stopped. Read them again, the whole list. Frowned. Sounded each word out carefully. "Connie, they all rhyme!"

So what do I do? Do I tell her to ignore her instincts and fill out the words that look like they rhyme? That's what she used to do when she was three. Do I let her fill out all of them and look like she didn't get it at all? I compromised by telling her that there's a good reason they put four rhyming words there, telling her to fill them all in, and writing a note to her teacher explaining this. Then, she she was done, I explained the pin-pen merger and talked her through the steps of a simple linguistic survey. We're totally stopping family members to see who has it and who doesn't today!

[Poll #1385210]

This isn't the first time I've had a language quibble with Ana's homework. Once she had to do "initial sounds that match" and one of the examples was a P word with a "pan". Except that I generally say skillet, and she generally says skillet, and when we don't say skillet we say frying pan. But she breezed right through that without a thought, proving that she understands very well how to do worksheets.

Comments

[lady-angelina.livejournal.com]

I used to, but learned to distinguish the pronunciations by the words' spellings. Still, I spell things out in case something might be misheard.

[codeman38.livejournal.com]

and I feel as though I'm twisting my mouth unnaturally to produce it myself.

Yep, that's exactly what it's like for me. I can make the distinction if I really try, but it comes out merged by default.

[dragonlight7217.livejournal.com]

I didn't even know there WAS a differance in the way you say pin and pen until my friend from CA said something about it a few years ago. =P

[conuly]

There isn't a difference in the way I say pin and pen, that's the point! :P

[lizziey.livejournal.com]

Nope, the words are completely different for me, so I'm guessing no merger. :)

[conuly]

That's what merger (doesn't) mean!

[azurelunatic]

Oh, one thing that made me SO FUCKING ANGRY once upon a time: my virtual aunt's adopted nephew was being evaluated for needing extra help in school. (As it happened, he did need it, and he did get it.) They had him fill out some age-appropriate worksheets and included his results on those in the assessment.

One of the things in there was "things we play with". It included things like a ball, a game board, some totally-not-a-toy, and a horse.

Now, my virtual aunt *has* two horses. And the kid did, in fact, *play with the horses*.

You can probably see where this is going. He did show some confusion about that item, because not every kid has horses to play with, but he ultimately decided that this was more "things I play with" and less "things most kids play with", and put the horse on. The question, of course, was marked WRONG.

[conuly]

When IQ tests were first devised they were intended to be given one-on-one, with a trained questioner who could carefully evaluate answers and understand where a novel question was more complete instead of simply "wrong" - or understand if a wrong question was the result of overthinking instead of lack of comprehension.

[sayga.livejournal.com]

I had just moved from England to the US when I was given an IQ test. They showed me a picture of a building with big white columns in front of it. I learned that word as "pillars." So I said pillars, and I could see that she marked me as getting that one wrong. I was so mad that I started reading answers off her sheet (cause I could read upside down) so that I'd give her the "correct" word, because she couldn't understand that some things have more than one name! So I cheated on my IQ test. Oh well.

[leora.livejournal.com]

My brother is still annoyed about the one question he got "wrong" on his IQ test. I forget the example items but it was: which of these items would a carpenter not use?

He didn't select the paintbrush. When told it was the paintbrush he replied, "So, how would a carpenter apply shellac?"

I have the pin-pen distinction and when other people don't I often find it very annoying. I try not to be too annoyed with them, since it isn't their fault, but it means I don't know what they're saying. It took me ages to figure out that someone's name was actually a quite common one, because I had been told it was different than it was. I'm not actually sure that example is tied to the pin-pen distinction or some other distinction that was lacking. But still, it's annoying.

Mary and Merry are very different names. Aaron and Erin are completely different. And I thought I was introduced to someone named Kerin. which while a little unusual seemed plausible, but no, it was Karen, a much more common name.

This is part of what is nice about communication by text. Some people are clearer that way.

[wodhaund.livejournal.com]

It's interesting, I fought so hard to avoid developing a Southern accent as a child that I've ended up the only member of my family who doesn't have the pin-pen merger.

[conuly]

Why didn't you want a Southern accent as a child?

[ascian.livejournal.com]

Wow, I actually find the pin-pen merger mind-boggling. I mean, I get it, but I was kind of twitching until I read the article. 'THEY'RE TWO DIFFERENT WORDS! THEY SOUND DIFFERENT!' my Brain of Rules was yelling. :)

I totally dig wodhaund's old issues about accents. As a kid I was intensely grateful for my broadcast-standard dialect (southern Minnesota doesn't have the thick yoopie accent Fargo would have you believe), unaware that I was completely blind to my own pronunciation of 'yeah' as the quaint 'ya'.

Nowadays I'm a lot less prejudiced about accents too. I still dislike the Louisiana drawl, but more for aesthetic reasons than sociological, and I rather enjoy the dry Texas inflections. I've picked up the technique of adopting the regional accent when I'm trying to win people over or get along with strangers; it's not deliberate, it's a learned survival mechanism from my time in Louisiana when speaking a yankee dialect would get me sour looks from perfect strangers.

[feebeeglee.livejournal.com]

Yes I do darlin! Oklahoma City representin'!

DH (Chicago) says I say "twenty" and it rhymes with "funny." He smirks at me.

[codeman38.livejournal.com]

Hey, it's a good enough rhyme for the B-52s:

I got me a Chrysler, it seats about twenty
So hurry up and bring your jukebox money

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

Neither our midwestern mom nor our northwestern dad would be caught dead merging pin and pen (giving you some idea of the level of respect for Correct English in that house -- roughly similar to wodhaund's remarks about "southern=uneducated", only substitute "midwestern hick" for "southern"). So we didn't hear it and didn't do it ourselves. At our first school (in Illinois) kids were carefully taught to avoid the merge; at the second school (also in Illinois, about 35 miles from the first place) everyone merged it, giving rise to the term "ink pen". We have heard people who come nowhere near merging pin/pen say "ink pen". I mean, what other kind of pen would there be?

Gabriel and Jessy, who really do speak with midwestern rural accents and are often mistaken for Kentuckians, have no trace of a pin/pen merger. It's not that they never merge anything; "me/may" is straight out of Nell, they have "on/own" to a certain extent and "oil" rhymes with "coal". You'd have a blast listening to them and then listening to me or Andy.

[feebeeglee.livejournal.com]

A pig pen of course!

[l33tminion]

Does this mean you pronounce "in" as if it rhymes with "then"? Or "sin" like it rhymes with "ten"?

[conuly]

E before n becomes i.

[jalendavi-lady.livejournal.com]

I honestly don't know what my natural mental opinion on that is, as I was taught carefully in school that pin and pen were spelled differently but sounded alike, as in bough (a branch) and bow (to a person)!

[leora.livejournal.com]

...

My brain breaks at the notion of being taught that.

[fieryminge.livejournal.com]

I didn't answer the poll, but I'd have to say "Sometimes"

I know that it totally depends on how fast I am speaking. Sometimes pin comes out as an almost exaggerated short i.

But there are definitely times where I have had to stop and backtrack in my sentence and correct/clarify and say "You know, a pIn, like for your shirt?" (actually I think it happens more often than not but of course sitting here and saying sample sentences out loud isn't quite representative of my daily speech)

[pne.livejournal.com]

And I don't have the father/bother, cot/caught, merry/marry/Mary, hurry/fury, tory/torrid, mirror/nearer, fill/feel, full/fool, card/cord, tire/tar, tower/tar, or weak vowel (Rosa's/roses) mergers, either! And I have the foot/strut and TRAP-BATH splits! Do I get a gold star? :)

The poor/pore merger is variable for me - sometimes I think I say "poor" distinctly, sometimes it might merge with "pore". Perhaps I also think I keep them distinct but actually don't. (Just like I thought I say "e" as in "egg" in a bunch of words where I actually say something like "i" as in "if".)

I also natively had the wine/whine merger, tried consciously to split it (and now pronouncing wh- words *without* the "h" seems odd!) but am slowly re-merging them. Since the point was mostly that I think this split is nifty and I wanted Amy to acquire it, but she's showing no signs of doing so (e.g. "wy????" instead of "why????"). And since it's artificial to me, the split disappears in fast speech when I don't have enough time to think about a word in order to apply the split.

I do have the fern/fir/fur and horse/hoarse mergers. And I don't have the bad/lad and lot/cloth splits.

[leora.livejournal.com]

What is the father/bother one? Is it whether they rhyme or not? I'm not sure about tory/torrid or Rosa's/roses either.

I think poor and pore are pretty similar for me though. Also wine/whine.
Fir and fur are very similar. If there is any difference, fur feels a little fuller, like I say the vowel a smidge longer or something.
Horse and hoarse are also similar, except maybe I linger longer on the ending of hoarse. I think I give hoarse more s.

I don't see enough similarity in lot and cloth to figure out what could be merging there.

But I do natively have a "draw" "drawer" merger. They are both pronounced "draw". Having been teased mercilessly for this once I left New York, I have attempted to remove it. Leading to me sometimes randomly saying "drawer" when I mean "draw", which is incredibly silly being both wrong and not even something people do regionally. I also sometimes drop the ending of mirror turning it into something like mirra.

[pne.livejournal.com]

I finally set up my wireless again

And here I thought you were talking about a radio.

(As in, "Huh, do they still call it that in New York?". Because different regions use different words for lots of things.)

[sayga.livejournal.com]

I do not have the merger but Daniel does. He also calls his Aunt Gini (Virginia) and my sister Jenny the same name: both are somewhere between Gini and Jenny, but it's so confusing to me because they are completely different sounding names to me!

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Nope; my parents are Nebraskans and my childhood was mostly spent in California and New Jersey. I didn't even know there was such a thing as the pin/pen merger till I read Steinbeck in my teens. I'm not sure which book it is, probably Travels With Charley, but the cousin from Texas asks for a "pin" - "What kind do you want, a straight pin or a safety pin?" "Aont a fountain pin".

A lot of Spanish-speaking kids have trouble pronouncing the short i, and thus think that sit rhymes with seat.

I had such precise speech as a kid that people were always asking if I was British. I'm not; I'm not even related to anyone British. My own kid gets the same thing - I think it's an Aspie thing, actually; we're kinda slang-impaired, and have to consciously cultivate it, otherwise we sound like Victorian essayists.

[mayna.livejournal.com]

I really had no idea how you could think pin and pen rhyme until I started reading a lot of the comments.

That reminds me of when we were in New Zealand... when we say my son's name "Greg" they were thinking that we were saying "Craig" because when they see his name written, they read it like it is pronounced "Grigg".

[conuly]

Not quite the same, though, because I don't merge short e and i except in front of nasal vowels. Rig and reg still sound different to me, but bin and Ben don't. *checks out wikipedia* Oh, it looks like they don't merge them in NZ either.

[fjorab-teke.livejournal.com]

I don't have the merger unless I'm being casually lazy in speech or talking really fast. Generally if said individually or as the "focus" of the sentence, "pen" does have the "short e" and "pin" is definitely "short i." But probably about half the time I say them both as one would expectedly say "pin."