Regional Dialect (puma): Would kids recognize non-dialect ones anyway?

I'm working on my Readers again. They're English-learning materials that make multi-syllabic words much easier for students to read, so the kids get exposed to "hyena" and "albino" and the like before even "cat" and "fox".

The section I'm working on is a zoo trip, which introduces the "common sounds" of the vowels (aka the "short" sounds, of "bat bet bit bot but"). As I crafted sentences using the prepositions (in, at, on), I took a break to hunt down some zoo animals that are easy to read, and came up with lion, tiger, kudu, okapi, coati, and anole, among others.

And then puma. That gave me pause.

Cougar. Puma. Mountain lion. Panther. This big cat holds the Guinness Book of World Records listing for "most names", and those four are only the most common ones. (To make it worse, panther can describe leopards and jaguars as well.)

My question, then: If I just use "puma," are kids from other dialects going to be horribly confused? Is this different from how "kudu" and "coati" get assimilated via pictures? (Heck, even I didn't know what they were until I looked 'em up!) Is puma somehow worse?

The zoo trip is set in Idaho (Idaho and Ohio being easiest to read)... should I simply use the term folks from Idaho would use, and leave it to the parents/teachers to discuss the difference? I'd prefer to avoid Did Not Do The Research via signs labeled by someone who clearly doesn't live in the area.

Related question: What about these pairs?

• Soda vs. cola vs. pop
• Sofa vs. couch

I kind of assume that I could use "soda" for all areas, but change the pictures to match the products from those areas (kid wouldn't be drinking a bland-name Pepsi in all areas, but could be drinking an Italian soda or club soda etc.). I don't think I'd be that lucky with the use of the easy-read "sofa," but "couch" comes up a lot later mechanically, and I don't have many location words early on, so I hate to lose it... or its demonstration of the F, for which I have few words as it is.

edited 7th Apr '11 6:16:38 AM by Kilyle

Sofa and Couch are interchangeable. I've never met anyone who actually cared which word you used, and didn't understand both.

Soda/Cola/Pop is a regional thing. I'm from California, born and raised, so we've always said Soda. Certain places like the midwest, the south, and the eastern seabord use things like Pop/Cola/Coke(Suddenly all soda is coke) etc.

United States dialects are pretty interchangeable, the most they'll think is that you're from somewhere else in the US when it comes to words like that. The only ones that get weird words that nobody ever understands are people who live in some back woods country areas in the middle of nowhere. I had a guy in boot camp who was from a community up in some mountains on the east coast who called hedgehogs "whistlepigs" and called the neck the "goozle" among a ton of other colorful things I'd never heard before.

As for the Puma question, it wouldn't bug anyone much. People here are just as confused by a billion different words for that cat, but in my opinion Cougar is the most common.

I've heard of whistlepigs before. Same goes for calling skunks "pole-cats". Goozle is a new one though.

@OP: As far as the soda/cola/pop thing, I'd go with either Pop or Soda, because Cola is a specific type of soft drink that's been flavored with kola nuts. For example, Pepsi and Coke are colas, but Sprite is not.

Everything you could possibly have wanted to know. "Puma" is part of the scientific name for this animal, but mountain lion is probably the most widely used.

My dad's family moved here from Iowa when he was 3, so he grew up saying "pop". Everyone here just says "soda", so he says he uses "soda pop" as a sort of compromise. My family always say "couch", but we know what "sofa" means, and we generally say "cougar", due to the university.

If you say pop, most kids know you mean soda/coke. I don't know about other kids, but I actually thought pumas, panthers and cougars were different animals (I knew a mountain lion was a panther).

If it helps at all to have a view from a non-American, I call the animal you're thinking of a puma, and I was aware it was also called a mountain lion. I hadn't really heard the other names applied to it, and of course these days a cougar is what some people might call a Hot Mom. If nothing else kids might have heard of Puma because it's a type of running shoe.

edited 7th Apr '11 11:49:30 AM by captainbrass2

We've done "soda pop" a bit here. "Here" is Washington State, btw. But I don't think it's ever been a normal term for us, the one you say when you're not thinking about it.

We don't use "coke" for things other than Coke. I think "pop" is our standard. But I'm using "soda" for the start of the book, at least for now, because it comes first, mechanically. I can change pictures to make it refer to a different item if I need to... I think.

Info from outside the U.S.? Please do! I'm hoping to eventually market my readers to ESL students, or even places that speak English natively but it's not American English. So this info helps.

My plan, such as it is, is to complete a feasible Primer and First Reader for my dialect, introducing all the letters and common digraphs and other multigraphs (e.g., IGH), and ensure that it works as well as it can; and then, with a proof copy in my hand, do research on American dialects.

I figure I can produce three American versions, using three widespread dialects that collectively cover most of the States, allowing each student to get taught in a way fairly close to how they natively pronounce things. I realize it's infeasible to cover every dialectal variation, but surely a lot of people will feel reasonably close to e.g. Texas or South Carolina, and others close to New York, while Washington can cover much of the west coast.

I've tried to get info on the markings of my own dialect, but the best I get is "Well, you pronounce all the letters." Not entirely true (e.g., -ing endings are pronounced "een" only less stressed), but I suppose it makes for a good starting point.

I think that kids would learn about the native dilect from their family andhometown. I think teaching plain dialect-less English and letting them picl up on regional things from simply living where they do is the best way to go.

The main regionally interesting thing about Connecticut in terms of speech is that we call "subs" "grinders."

We treat all the vowls as distinct in pronounciation, most of the time, but our dialect isn't colorful.

Where are you in Washington State? Because I have never heard "pop" in Seattle. I thought it was a Midwestern thing. Another big differentiating factor of American accents is pronunciation of hard "t". Think of it as the difference between pronouncing 20 as "twenty" or "twenny"

I'm also having a hard time figuring out when "puma" would come up in conversation.

Besides, It's called a Warthog.

I'm Australian. If you refer to a puma, cougar, mountain lion or panther I'll know you're talking about an large American wild cat. If you use the terms interchangeably though I'd need to think a bit to know you're referring to the same thing.

Soda vs. cola vs. pop: We call them soft drinks. Soda is fizzy water. Cola is a soft drink flavoured with cola nuts (i.e. Coke, Pepsi, etc.). Pop is a sound effect. If you use "soda" I'll probably know what you mean but it marks the speaker as American influenced. Same with "pop" but it's very American. "Cola" will mean a cola flavoured beverage; calling lemonade "cola" will be confusing.

Sofa vs. couch: We use the terms interchangeably. Either is fine.

Wikipedia says a couch and a sofa are the same thing.

Oh, and Coke's a brand of cola, soda's what you drink, soda pop is what you say if you're old, and pop is what you say if you're being ironic. Cola's Coke, Pepsi, and generic storebrands.

But root beer is the best soda, so why offer anything else?

Cola definitely refers to a subset of the more general pop/soda stuff, from where I'm coming from. If I'm reading [http://popvssoda.com:2998/ that one site] right, the terms overlap quite a bit around the coastal areas of the U.S., so apparently "pop" and "soda" are both found up here in the Pacific Northwest. I wonder if the spread is partly due to the way people migrate from rural areas to higher populations, bringing their terms with them, but that's just a vague hunch.

As for sofa and couch, from my perspective they're terms that overlap largely but not completely. It doesn't help that my grandmother was always calling hers the davenport. But I think "sofa" can be used in politer conversation than "couch" can, and that "sofa" can refer to certain configurations that "couch" can't (not sure I could enumerate them, though).

[quote]I think teaching plain dialect-less English and letting them pick up on regional things from simply living where they do is the best way to go.[/quote]

Well......

1. There's no such thing as "dialect-less English."

In England, they have Received Pronunciation, the dialect taught to kids in school and used on TV news, so at least they have a standard dialect. In America, we don't even have that.

Since I'm primarily a descriptionist rather than a prescriptionist, I don't think this is a bad thing. I think it's sad that the written language got frozen generations ago and didn't follow the spoken language; at present, this helps us communicate across dialectal divides, but as generations pass it's just gonna make the written language less and less like any form of the spoken language at all.

2. The primary gist of my program is "you write the sounds that you say." In order for this to make any sense at all, the program has to be reasonably close to the sounds the student is using.

I don't think it'll be difficult to adjust my system for different dialects, though. For example, in my dialect we pronounce ar as ah-r (as in far), and it'll be coded with a red vowel A and black consonant R. In places where they pronounce that combo ah (Ah pahked mah cah), we'll just code the ar combo as entirely red, showing the red vowel sound that goes there. Instead of "you're not even saying the R," we get "that R helps the A say the red sound" (as with aw) and it makes a lot more sense.

Anyway. That's my goal, after studying dozens of texts that completely teach over the schwa sound (any vowel can make the unstressed "uh" sound (banana, the, coconut... I forget the easy example for i), and A and O can also make the "uh" sound when stressed: want, was, done, oven). Or the ai combo when it says eh (again, against, said, captain). Systems that teach these as "wrong" sounds drive me up a wall, because they clearly haven't studied sound shifts and don't teach phonologically related sounds ("ey" (they) and "eh" (then) are at the same spot in the mouth, they're a tense/lax pair).

Something's wrong with a system that can take a kid who's already pronouncing things right and tell him to pronounce them wrong in order to spell them right. You don't go around telling kids to say "loave" for love (luv) or "doan" for done (dun); why this "wahnt" for want (wunt) and "thee" for the (thuh)?

edited 11th Apr '11 4:37:18 AM by Kilyle

So you want to accelerate the regionalization of English?

"Puma" in conversation would be just e.g. "See, Amy? A baby puma" in the zoo chapter. It's one of the few words with the third sound of U that has a useful picture attached (my other choices: tutu, tuna, tuba, emu, sumo).

And yeah, it's not like knowing puma specifically will come in handy a lot, but the point is to reinforce the sounds that have been introduced, in various configurations.

So you want to accelerate the regionalization of English?

Well......

I've got mixed feelings about it.

On the one hand, we have this kinda awesome system where a guy in Georgia can communicate with a guy in Australia and a guy in Wisconsin without too much dialect-related confusion. That's a plus, and I'm not denying it.

On the other hand, we're moving toward the stage where we just have to tell the kids, "Look, I know the writing system is nothing like the way you speak, but you just have to learn it anyway, okay?" And I'm 100% against that in principle.

Also, I don't think it would be incredibly difficult to read accents if they were written how they sound. As long as we're talking sentences and context, as opposed to isolated words, we're all able to decode stuff like pirate speech or mimicry of actual dialects ("Thar's nae guld in them thar hills" as a bad example, but you get the idea).

I should point out that this used to be what people did, and only recently did we decide it was "wrong". Check out Shakespeare in the original; he hardly spelt the same word the same way twice. JBR's Fantasy has more info on some of the history, and of the objections to spelling reform.

I'm... I don't like to use this word, but I suppose it's the right one... anal about spelling. I can spot errors in published documents like they're outlined in red. I don't need spell-checkers except in rare cases (some doubled letters, occasional punctuation conventions). But I still think we need spelling reform.

And since we're not likely to get it soon, I intend to do what I can to help people learn the hodgepodge we have to deal with now.

edited 12th Apr '11 7:50:48 PM by Kilyle

I've gone to school in 7 different states and 3 different countries(including US), and honestly, prior to today, I had no idea that cougars, pumas, mountain lions, and panthers were the same cat.

Honestly, if you're that worried about the confusion, I'd use "emu" as you have the option to...