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From: Athel Cornish-Bowden <me@yahoo.com>
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Subject: Re: Galveston
Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2025 11:28:03 +0100
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On 2025-03-25 05:54:41 +0000, Ross Clark said:

> On 24/03/2025 5:19 a.m., Ruud Harmsen wrote:
>> Sat, 22 Mar 2025 16:09:34 -0000 (UTC): Christian Weisgerber
>> <naddy@mips.inka.de> scribeva:
>> 
>>> On 2025-03-22, Ruud Harmsen <rh@rudhar.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Yes, I understand that’s the explanation. But I still think it’s a
>>>> weird rhyme, because of the stress difference, and because in my view
>>>> (which is not mainstream and is not scientifically based, I know),
>>>> they are not the same phoneme.
>>> 
>>> But many speakers do perceive them as the same phoneme.  In fact,
>>> the realization in the song is a test for this:  What happens to
>>> unstressed schwa when the speaker is forced to stress the vowel,
>>> e.g. contrastive stress or, as in the song, secondary stress for
>>> rhythmic reasons?  It becomes the STRUT vowel.
>> 
>> Yes, agreed, I can believe. I only wonder what would happen if a
>> British singer were to sing this. I don’t know the answer.
> 
> Probably they would imitate the pronunciation of Glen Campbell or 
> whoever they had heard singing it. More interesting would be to know 
> whether British songs go in for this kind of artificial accenting of 
> unaccented syllables. (England has plenty of -ton place names; are any 
> of them in songs?)

There are of course English place names that don't follow the usual 
rules. The village of Stokenham in Devon is pronounced as an Americam 
would expect, with stressed /'hæm/ at the end. In the opposite 
direction, Amherst in Massachusetts is pronounced as a British person 
would expect: /'æməst/.
> 
> I thought of another song where this happens: The Lily of the West, 
> which (in the version I know, by Joan Baez) has a lengthened and 
> accented last syllable on "Lexington". Several versions of this are on 
> YouTube. It seems that its UK cognates may not include a place name.
> 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lily_of_the_West


-- 
Athel cb