Post by Arthur T.Here's a short alphabetized list of words. I'm curious which
you think rhyme with each other. So as not to prejudice you, I'll
give my answers later, along with my reason for asking.
beg
craig
egg
greg
keg
leg
meg
peg
plague
vague
Plague & vague, usually -- my pronunciation of the 'g' in vague can
drift a smidgen towards a gamma sometimes.
Beg, Greg, keg, leg, meg, & peg, I would use as rhymes without a
second thought. Egg too, after a pause to decide (the 'gg' feels
different in my mouth, but I can't figure out how to describe it,
and it's not really different to my ear, just in my mouth).
It would probably not occur to me to rhyme Craig with any of these,
because the vowel sound stretches a little longer -- like 'ehg'
instead if 'eg' for the e-sound version, and 'aiyg' instead of 'ayg'
for the a-sound version (both of which I'm used to hearing and
saying). Also, the a-sound Craig has a very hard cut-off at the
end, but plague and vague have, um, like a pianissimo schwa grace-
note after the 'g'. But if somebody else used it to rhyme with leg
it wouldn't jar me out of the flow of reading or listening to
something. If used as a rhyme for plague, I'd blink -- jolted out
of the flow and conscious of mechanics for a moment -- but not get
derailed.
Rhyming egg with plague would work (maybe a little jarringly) if I
were listening to a piece recited in a Scottish accent, but not very
easily if I were reading it.
My ear: raised in central Maryland by a Greek Cypriot mother with
a slight English accent, and a northern-Virginia-accent father ...
but curiously I do not have quite the same accent as my siblings
and I don't know why. Early reader. Exposed to a bunch of non-local
accents. High school French, a little ancient Greek, teensy tiny
bit of modern Greek.
--
D. Glenn Arthur Jr./The Human Vibrator, ***@panix.com
Due to hand/wrist problems my newsreading time varies so I may miss followups.
"Being a _man_ means knowing that one has a choice not to act like a 'man'."
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