Teacher Discussion Forums

[jotham]

I was caught in error today, and when that happens, I want to know why. All dictionaries pronounce legacy with a short e. But I've grown up for some reason pronouncing it with a long e. I wonder if this is my Kansas accent or if I just picked this up from reading the word wrongly rather than listening to it correctly. I know this is a common mistake when people say often with a t (which I also do and try to correct.)

I also realize that dictionaries will provide only one pronunciation of a word, like the East Coast variation for pen, though we MidWesterners and Californians say pen and pin alike. So I can't be clear whether or not this is dialect.

Does anyone know the answer to this offhand?
Or does anyone know if there are corpora or other search engines that can help identify accents or dialects of certain words?

I've scoured the Internet as far as I know, and so far have to assume that I'm uniquely wrong.

[fluffyhamster]

Perhaps you're not getting the stress quite on the first syllable? Anyway, FWIW, I pronounce it as ending in /i/ ('happy') rather than /i:/ ('sheep'), as per the Longman's guide to the IPA, and the pronunciation given in the OALD (the LDOCE online doesn't appear to display the IPA in its actual entries):
http://www.ldoceonline.com/images/665/pron_image006.png
http://www.oxfordadvancedlearnersdictionary.com/dictionary/legacy

Regarding regional differences in pronunciation, have you tried Googling 'dialect maps'? You might also like to try searching for something like 'parallel corpora of dialect(al) regional variation in America'.

[jotham]

[fluffyhamster]

As 'a long e' isn't in the phonemic inventory of symbols given in e.g. the Longman's pronunciation scheme, I honestly thought you were referring in a rough n ready non-technical way to the final phoneme in the word 'legacy'. (Using IPA wherever possible is always best/unambiguous!). But as it's now clearly the first vowel sound that you were on about, I've only ever heard and pronounced it as /e/, never as a longer sound (/3:/?), but do bear in mind that I'm British.

[jotham]

[Metamorfose]

I'll assume short e to sound like the vowel in ten and long e like the vowel sound in teen.

You should check if the change short e to long e and/or short e to short i is systematical in your speech and/or speech community. It seems something that goes on in your speech community as I can tell. This phenomenum is a kind of vowel raising because it looks like that short e's become long e's (legacy to something like leegacy) or short i (neutralisation of pen and pin)

Are there any other words that in standard American English is short e but you end up using long e or short i?

And often with /t/ isn't historically more accurate than without it?

José

[fluffyhamster]

Like I say, it would help if you indicated what this 'long e' of yours/your pronunciation of 'legacy' sounds like, Jotham (refer to the Longman link I provided earlier if need be - it has guide words e.g. /3:/ as in bird). I've assumed it's /3:/ (closer to the /e/ of the standard pronunciation of the first vowel phoneme in 'legacy'), but José reckons (I think! LOL) that it is or could be /i:/ (which would like I've said be closer to the /i/ versus /i:/ -y ending that I was first contemplating, rather than to the initial vowel phoneme in 'legacy'). That is, even with all the Great Ewok Vowel Shifts or whatever's been going on, there is surely too great a qualitative difference between /e/ and /i:/ for you to have been using the latter in place of the former, right? (/3:/ though I could just about understand). Still, perhaps you've been analogizing (wrongly LOL) on the basis of something like the the 'leg'=/li:g/ part of 'legal'?

[jotham]

[jotham]

[jotham]

My mom said they pronounce it like everyone else, so I've decided that I'm just wrong. I read the word many more times than I'd ever heard it enough times to guide my pronunciation. Well, time to practice it now. See how many sentences I can make a day using the word. Not something you use every day.....I can understand how I could have read the word more than hearing it.

[fluffyhamster]

Isn't there much about e.g. 'Bush's legacy' in the US media? (Probably not as much as there is about Blair's legacy though - I Googled the two and the results were 25,300,000 to "only" 4,870,000). Then, there was a dodgy 1979 horror film called The Legacy that must've helped inform my linguistic development.