This rings true for me: Rosen says in this article that, "When people object to the way others speak,... it is nearly always because of the way that a particular
linguistic feature is seen as belonging to a cluster of disliked social
features."For me, it is like the way you find a name objectionable if you know someone with that name that you don't like.
http://www.theguardian.com/science/shortcuts/2013/nov/04/letter-h-contentious-alphabet-history-alphabetical-rosen
I've never understood any of these sort of debates. If the full meaning was carried from speaker to listener without error, then nothing is wrong in the world.
ReplyDeleteI could see myself being annoyed by it if my name began with H (you probably get called Alla an awful lot) but even so I think some people allocate way too many precious minutes of their life complaining about the way other people do things, especially trivial matters such as slight pronunciation differences. If anything these little quirks and dialects should be coveted and preserved as examples of human culture affecting language.