Glass Half Baked wrote: ↑Wed Feb 19, 2025 6:03 pm
It's not easy to say whether super or sugar is the exception, though, since there are so few examples (remember, we're only talking about /su/ that predates the GVS, so "soon" is irrelevant).
FWIW super stands out as a Latin loan— compare suture, supine. The OED thinks the latter two have an optional yod in British English.
One thing to remember is that super is visibly a Latinate loan, so it is not unsurprising that it is less integrated than earlier and more common Oïl loans which originally had /y/ which became /iw/, and thus have different and less irregular diachronics. It should be remembered that the regular outcome of stressed EModE /siw/ in non-yod-dropping varieties is /sjuː/, and the yod-coalescence in sure and sugar is highly irregular and probably an artifact of these being very common, highly integrated words.
zompist wrote: ↑Wed Feb 19, 2025 6:33 pm
Is suit relevant? I'm not sure what the vowel was in Anglo-French— there's an alternate spelling siwete which suggests a diphthong at least. (Modern French /sɥit/ presumably comes from /syitə/.)
Siwete implies historical French /syitə/, as the regular outcome of Oïl /y/ in LME or EModE (depending on if you posit a LME phoneme /y/ from Oïl /y/, and if you do, how long it survived before merging with /iw/) is /iw/, combined with reduction of the /i/ to schwa.
Last edited by Travis B. on Wed Feb 19, 2025 6:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.
jcb wrote: ↑Wed Feb 19, 2025 3:55 pm
What did you think of COT-CAUGHT mergers when you were growing up? Did you even notice them? Did you think that they just pronounced certain words different and not realize is was systemic?
I was completely oblivious to the very existence of the cot-caught merger, partially that I had no awareness that anyone would merge them, but seemingly contradictorily because for me [ɑ(ː)] is an acceptable realization of both /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ (except /ɔ/ before /r/)*, so I didn't notice when people did merge the two.
* For me [ɑ(ː)] is the realization of /ɑ/ adjacent to /r w h kw gw/ (/ɑ/ otherwise is [a]), and while my normal realization of /ɔ/ not before /r/ is [ɒ(ː)], I will sporadically realize it as [ɑ(ː)], I am very used to [ɑ(ː)] as a valid realization of /ɔ/ not before /r/ as that is what my mother has for it (she has a similar realization of /ɑ/ as myself, where it is normally [a(ː)] but is [ɑ(ː)] adjacent to /r w h kw gw/). Adding to this, I am familiar with [ɑ(ː)] as a valid realization of /ɑ/ in all environments from its realization in GA.
Wait, so if [A] is an acceptable realization of /O/, then what is /A/ ? [a] ?
Except adjacent to /r w h kw gw/, yes, /ɑ/ is [a(ː)] in the varieties in southeastern Wisconsin (even though those highly affecting a basilectal Milwaukee accent may say [æ(ː)] as in Wisc[æ̃ː]nsin, even though I practically never hear this in Real Life).
Travis B. wrote: ↑Mon Jan 20, 2025 2:12 pm
The key thing is that most North Americans at least to my knowledge have no idea that anyone makes a distinction between two vowels in these words. (I didn't until I was well into adulthood.)
And then a selecti quidem of us grew up in a city with at START-NORTH merger and didn't realise their pronunciation of words like "forest" and "horror" was not GA until high school.
Is an incomplete START-NORTH merger why some dialects (like mine) have /A/ in SORRY and SORROW, but still have /o/ in FOREST and HORROR, despite the spelling the former with <o>?
Edit: Fixed HORROR.
Last edited by jcb on Thu Feb 20, 2025 11:31 am, edited 1 time in total.
Travis B. wrote: ↑Mon Jan 20, 2025 2:12 pm
The key thing is that most North Americans at least to my knowledge have no idea that anyone makes a distinction between two vowels in these words. (I didn't until I was well into adulthood.)
And then a selecti quidem of us grew up in a city with at START-NORTH merger and didn't realise their pronunciation of words like "forest" and "horror" was not GA until high school.
Is an incomplete START-NORTH merger why some dialects (like mine) have /A/ in SORRY and SORROW, but still have /o/ in FOREST and SORROW, despite the spelling the former with <o>?
This is a standard feature in GA, where the words tomorrow, borrow, sorrow, sorry have historical LOT before /r/ shifted to /ɑ/ unlike all other cases of LOT before /r/ in words such as forest, horrible, and Florida which have been shifted in GA to /ɔ/ (which, being before /r/, does not undergo the cot-caught merger in affected dialects).
(My own native dialect almost follows the GA pattern here except that it shifts sorry to /ɔ/ even though it shifts sorrow to /ɑ/, but that is not true of all people in southeastern Wisconsin, e.g. my daughter has /ɑ/ in sorry.)
Linguoboy wrote: ↑Tue Jan 21, 2025 7:54 pm
And then a selecti quidem of us grew up in a city with at START-NORTH merger and didn't realise their pronunciation of words like "forest" and "horror" was not GA until high school.
Is an incomplete START-NORTH merger why some dialects (like mine) have /A/ in SORRY and SORROW, but still have /o/ in FOREST and SORROW, despite the spelling the former with <o>?
This is a standard feature in GA, where the words tomorrow, borrow, sorrow, sorry have historical LOT before /r/ shifted to /ɑ/ unlike all other cases of LOT before /r/ in words such as forest, horrible, and Florida which have been shifted in GA to /ɔ/ (which, being before /r/, does not undergo the cot-caught merger in affected dialects).
I know that it's standard. I assume it's because of an incomplete shift in GA, or because GA was assembled from various other dialects, some of which shifted, and some which didn't.
(My own native dialect almost follows the GA pattern here except that it shifts sorry to /ɔ/ even though it shifts sorrow to /ɑ/, but that is not true of all people in southeastern Wisconsin, e.g. my daughter has /ɑ/ in sorry.)
That's similar to me: SORROW always has /A/, but SORRY can have either /A/ or /o/. (I prefer /A/.)
jcb wrote: ↑Wed Feb 19, 2025 7:08 pm
Is an incomplete START-NORTH merger why some dialects (like mine) have /A/ in SORRY and SORROW, but still have /o/ in FOREST and SORROW, despite the spelling the former with <o>?
This is a standard feature in GA, where the words tomorrow, borrow, sorrow, sorry have historical LOT before /r/ shifted to /ɑ/ unlike all other cases of LOT before /r/ in words such as forest, horrible, and Florida which have been shifted in GA to /ɔ/ (which, being before /r/, does not undergo the cot-caught merger in affected dialects).
I know that it's standard. I assume it's because of an incomplete shift in GA, or because GA was assembled from various other dialects, some of which shifted, and some which didn't.
My guess is that it was dissimilation triggered by the /oʊ/ in the second syllable, except in the case of sorry which was by analogy with sorrow.
zompist wrote: ↑Wed Feb 19, 2025 6:33 pm
Is suit relevant? I'm not sure what the vowel was in Anglo-French— there's an alternate spelling siwete which suggests a diphthong at least. (Modern French /sɥit/ presumably comes from /syitə/.)
Siwete implies historical French /syitə/, as the regular outcome of Oïl /y/ in LME or EModE (depending on if you posit a LME phoneme /y/ from Oïl /y/, and if you do, how long it survived before merging with /iw/) is /iw/, combined with reduction of the /i/ to schwa.
The original Old French form is siute, sieute /ˈsiy̯tə/; suite is apparently a later metathetic form paralleled by tuile < tiule "tile". Spellings of the type siute, siwte, sywte are thus unsurprisingly predominant in the earliest Middle English attestations; suite, suyte only appears later (mostly after 1400) as a adjustment to contemporary French spelling norms.