Early Loss of [<i>r</i>] Before Dentals

Hill, Archibald A.

doi:10.2307/458450

Cited by 10 publications

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“…British English dialects were rhotic from Anglo-Saxon times up until approximately the 17th century (Crystal, 2005:467). The period in which (r) began to change in British dialects is not certain; Hill (1940), for example, noted variability in (r) as far back as 1300 (cited in Bonfiglio, 2002). By the 19th century, the change in postvocalic r received attention from prescriptive grammarians such as the British John Walker, author of the influential Pronouncing Dictionary of English (1774), who noted that /r/ had begun to sound “soft” in words like farm (Crystal, 2005:467).…”

Section: A Brief History Of English (R)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Boston (r): Neighbo(r)s nea(r) and fa(r)

Nagy

Irwin

2010

Lang Var Change

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Boston (r): Neighbo(r)s nea(r) and fa(r) A B S T R A C TThe influence of linguistic and social factors on (r) in Boston and two New Hampshire towns is described. The preceding vowel and geographic, ethnic, and age-related differences were found to have strong effects. In comparison to Bostonians, New Hampshire speakers exhibit a higher rate of rhoticity, and fewer factors constrain their variability. Younger speakers are more rhotic than older speakers, as are more educated speakers and those in higher linguistic marketplace positions. This study demonstrates that these patterns fit the transmission (within Boston) and diffusion (to New Hampshire) framework (Labov, 2007) only with the addition of accommodation theory (Niedzielski & Giles, 1996), which connects our linguistic findings to evidence that many New Hampshire residents do not identify with Boston. The effects on (r) in other studies are compared to determine which effects are particular to individual communities (nonuniversal) and which occur across all communities examined. The nonuniversal effects are therefore available as measures of contact-induced change. This study introduces a method for quantitatively comparing the amount of change between communities.As sociolinguistic research accumulates, we acquire multiple perspectives on certain linguistic variables whose usage has been examined in a variety of communities and by a variety of methods. The variable (r), defined as the variable acoustic presence of a constricted [r] in a syllable coda, is among the most widely studied sociolinguistic patterns, having been the subject of one of Labov's (1972) early investigations. 1 It has been examined in a variety of English dialects in the United States, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand, at least, as well as in other Germanic languages, such as Dutch (see overview in Plug & Ogden, 2003). Given the extensive research on (r) in the fields of phonetics, phonology, and sociolinguistics, and the notoriety of (r) as a featureWe thank all the speakers for their contributions. We are very grateful for comments, which greatly improved the paper, from the anonymous reviewers. Remaining shortcomings are our own.

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Section: A Brief History Of English (R)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Boston (r): Neighbo(r)s nea(r) and fa(r)

Nagy

Irwin

2010

Lang Var Change

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“…This loss of/r/ is not the recent change which affected British RP and much of the American coast, but is rather the Middle Ages' early loss before dentals reported by Hill (1940). This is evidently the vowel of cat, which Kurath and McDavid (p. 143) report as appearing "on the Atlantic coast in North Carolina and the Appalachians south of the Kanawha River.…”

Section: Mcdavid P 167) No Illinois Dare Informant Had This Pronunmentioning

confidence: 82%

Joseph Kirkland's Zury as Linguistic Evidence

Frazer¹

1982

American Speech

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“…the etymologies in RHD may be a rephrasing of this statement. Hill's (1940) list, culled almost entirely from modern dialects, contains numerous examples of the loss of r before dentals. the following words in it have postvocalic rn: barn 'child', burn, carney 'coax', curn 'currant', herne 'corner', journey (which rhymes with man), morning, mourn, parnel [paenel] 'loose woman', spurn, turn, turnip, and several place names.…”

Section: Ain' T (1778)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Three Words of American Interest in a Prospective New Etymological Dictionary of English: Ain't, Alairy, and Alewife

Liberman

2014

American Speech

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the article features three entries from An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology, preparation of which is currently underway. the entries offer comprehensive reports (without references to articles and books that contain neither new data nor original ideas) and cautious solutions about the origins of ain't, alairy, and alewife.(1) While the contractions of am not, is not, and are not have been proposed as candidates from which ain't derived, the author rules out each and concludes that the most likely etymon is haven't.(2) the word alairy, used in a girls' ball-bouncing game, seem to be related to a-lery, a middle english hapax legomenon from Piers Plowman, and is possibly related to old english līra 'calf of the leg'. (3) Despite speculation that alewife, a type of fish with a large belly found in the North Atlantic, was metaphorically named after a corpulent alehouse keeper, it is more likely that the fish, known in many countries as alose, allice, Alse, alley, allowes, and the like, was changed to alewife because of folk etymology. for many years i have been researching the etymology of obscure english words, that is, words lacking secure cognates or of an unascertained country of origin. the project goes back to the mid-1980s and grew out of my dissatisfaction with the existing english etymological dictionaries. in english studies, serious etymological lexicography (as opposed to serious research in etymology) stopped in 1910, with the appearance of the last edition of Skeat's great work. the Oxford English Dictionary (OED 1933) offers inestimable ideas on word origins, but it is a historical dictionary, a special genre. exemplary etymological dictionaries are Feist (1939) on Gothic, Walde-Hofmann (1930) on latin, and Vasmer (1950-58) on russian. though all etymological information can be incorporated into a historical dictionary (cf. Wartburg's multivolume set on French) and though history and etymology are in practice hard or impossible to separate, they are different things. Feist's model presupposes an exhaustive discussion of every conjecture on American SpeechPublished by Duke University Press

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Early Loss of [r] Before Dentals

Abstract: It is well known that stressed post-vocalic [r] has been lost in many dialects of Modern English. Besides this recent loss historians of English have recognized that some [r]s in stressed syllables were lost at an earlier date.

Cited by 10 publications

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Boston (r): Neighbo(r)s nea(r) and fa(r)

Boston (r): Neighbo(r)s nea(r) and fa(r)

Joseph Kirkland's Zury as Linguistic Evidence

Three Words of American Interest in a Prospective New Etymological Dictionary of English: Ain't, Alairy, and Alewife

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