eric@sri-unix (11/29/82)
To Pete Hardie; I have grown very familiar with the mispronunciation of height you describe (terminal soft th). Though I can't call instances to mind, I'm sure I have heard it both in Atlanta and here in Portland, OR. And with regard to David Elliott's linguistic relativist stance, I submit that my user of the word mispronunciation above is correct. There is a sizeable body of linguistic behavior in the population of English speakers which characterizes usages as wrong, and I think that the mispronunciation of height would be so characterized by most speakers queried. If the linguistic relativist is simply pointing out an unfortunate fact about the impossibility of stemming incorrect usages of a word, that is one thing, but his comments seem to place David Elliott among those anarchistic linguistic relativists who not only describe language, but venture into normative aspects of the field by contesting normative judgements. The principle these anarchistic linguistic relativists (please flame only if you are in fact an anarchistic, *normative* linguistic relativist) use to contest normative judgements is that no normative judgement can be enforced, therefore none should be made. I thought we had laid to rest the derivation of an "ought" from an "is" with the English classical empiricists. teklabs!reed!eric Johnson