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Chris -- 2018-04-11

#1 2006-07-04 22:46:32

Kirk
Member
From: San Francisco, California
Registered: 2006-04-17
Posts: 10

Thingsgiving

Found on this forum:

Therefore I congratulated President Bush at Thingsgiving, for his secret trip to Iraq, to have dinner with them and restore morale amongst the troops.

and on another forum :

Hey guys i hope everyone had a fine thingsgiving.

This is an interesting one because there is some connection between “Thanksgiving” and “thingsgiving” (I suppose there is some “things-giving” involved in the holiday). Besides the semantic connection there also is a phonological explanation which might clear things (pun only partially intended) up. Historically, some US speakers (this is relatively widespread) have had the spoken (if usually not written) variant “thang” for “thing,” thus making “thanks” and “things” have similar or identical vowels for such speakers (related to my previous post about raising of /{N/ to [eN] the realization may actually be [e]). With the semantic and phonological similarities such a form and “Thingsgiving” isn’t too surprising, I guess.

Last edited by Kirk (2006-07-05 01:53:21)

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#2 2006-07-06 14:38:08

patschwieterman
Administrator
From: California
Registered: 2005-10-25
Posts: 1680

Re: Thingsgiving

I think your explanation is possible, but I’ve got an alternate (or additional) guess. I’d never encountered the “Thingsgiving” spelling before you pointed it out, but for years I’ve thought that I heard some young people around here (you and I seem to live in the same neck of the woods) say “Thingsgiving,” or something very close to it. And I noticed that long before I had heard of the California Vowel Shift that linguists at Stanford and UC Berkeley and other places have been pointing to. If you believe in the California Vowel Shift (admittedly, I’m not yet completely persuaded by all of it, but then again I don’t spend much time analyzing spectograms), the first vowel in “Thanksgiving” should be moving towards /iy/ in some speakers. You might expect this to be written as “Theengsgiving,” but then again the CVS people say that the vowel in “king” is also moving towards /i/, providing a neat precedent for the “Thingsgiving” spelling.

Of course, it’s possible that none of the people who’ve written “Thingsgiving” on online sites are actually Californians. Now I plan to listen particularly closely to my students’ vowels as we get closer to the end of November.

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#3 2006-07-08 18:04:47

Kirk
Member
From: San Francisco, California
Registered: 2006-04-17
Posts: 10

Re: Thingsgiving

patschwieterman wrote:

I think your explanation is possible, but I’ve got an alternate (or additional) guess. I’d never encountered the “Thingsgiving” spelling before you pointed it out, but for years I’ve thought that I heard some young people around here (you and I seem to live in the same neck of the woods) say “Thingsgiving,” or something very close to it. And I noticed that long before I had heard of the California Vowel Shift that linguists at Stanford and UC Berkeley and other places have been pointing to. If you believe in the California Vowel Shift (admittedly, I’m not yet completely persuaded by all of it, but then again I don’t spend much time analyzing spectograms),

Well I believe in the California Vowel Shift because I know it’s influenced my vowels to some extent :) I just graduated from college and I have to say that altho it was surely around beforehand I noticed the shift consciously in my vowels and the vowels of my friends and peers towards the end of my first year in college (before I learned that the vowel shift had been identified and documented—at first I thought I was just imagining things but after months of listening to myself and others and then finally coming across Stanford linguist Penelope Eckert’s report on it it was confirmed).

Anyway, I’m not sure if I’d call the raised front vowels before /N/ as part of the California Vowel Shift (Eckert lists /IN/ > [iN] as part of the shift) anyway but just a separate development where lax front vowels raise and tense before same-morpheme /N/.

But regardless of the cause, “thing” is somewhat of an interesting case because there is the spoken variant “thang” (if you listen many people do have it tho they don’t realize it). Thus at least personally I have (I’m using X-SAMPA for all my transcriptions here, by the way) the following possible pronunciations for “thing”:

[TeN] spoken variant “thang” (but really “thayng” faux-notetically)
[TiN] “thing”

But for other words without such a variant it’s regular. Here are some of my pronunciations:

“tan” [t_h{n]
“tank” [t_heNk]

“sin” [sIn]
“sing” [siN]

“lent” [lEnt]
“length” [leN(k)T]

Thus, since my “Thanksgiving” is [“TeNksgIviN] I can understand how “things” as [TeNz] might allow people to get confused with it given the identical vowels and similar consonant sequences.

patschwieterman wrote:

the first vowel in “Thanksgiving” should be moving towards /iy/ in some speakers. You might expect this to be written as “Theengsgiving,” but then again the CVS people say that the vowel in “king” is also moving towards /i/, providing a neat precedent for the “Thingsgiving” spelling.

Yeah I typically pronounce “keen” [k_hin] and “king” [k_hiN] with the same vowel (“kin” is [k_hIn] and “bit” is [bIt], for comparison)

patschwieterman wrote:

Of course, it’s possible that none of the people who’ve written “Thingsgiving” on online sites are actually Californians. Now I plan to listen particularly closely to my students’ vowels as we get closer to the end of November.

Yeah I’ll have to see if I notice anyone around me saying it. I’m not sure how common it is.

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