Zompist Bboard Again

Linguoboy wrote: ↑Tue Feb 04, 2025 10:47 am

Travis B. wrote: ↑Tue Feb 04, 2025 10:33 am In the dialect here, forget and forgive often have the for- prefixes change to /frə/ [fʁˤəː], presumably to avoid [ɔːʁˤɡ] or [ʁ̩ˤːɡ]. I have not heard of this being noted anywhere as happening in any English varieties; this is just from my own personal observation. Is anyone else aware of this happening in any other English varieties? I am interested in finding out how widespread this change is.

I don't recall hearing this. However, my father (Baltimore, MD) did have sporadic /pɚ/ > /prɹ/ in words like perception.

vlad wrote: ↑Wed Feb 05, 2025 4:59 pm I have /prə/ rather than /pə/ in perform, performance, etc.

vlad wrote: ↑Wed Feb 05, 2025 4:59 pm But it's an isolated example. Similar words like perceive, percussion, permission, perplex, persist, persuade are unaffected.

Raphael wrote: ↑Wed Feb 12, 2025 6:16 am Inspired by some current posts in the Conlangery Forum, I wonder: Does the distinction between nouns, verbs, and adjectives in English even make sense? It seems that words of each of those types can be, and often are, easily turned into words of each of the other two types.

Glass Half Baked wrote: ↑Tue Feb 18, 2025 5:31 am I have a question about yod-coalescence. In dialects with yod-coalescence, "sure" and "sugar" are pronounced with an SH sound. But "super" is not.
I have run through every reason for this I can think of, and have come up with nothing.
1. Could it be because super is a more recent loan? No. It is attested in Middle English, before yod-coalescence happened.
2. Maybe it just never had a palatal glide? No. Sugar and sure didn't have palatal glides originally either, but they acquired them through phonological processes that should have also happened to super.
3. Perhaps it lost its glide? No. Some dialects still pronounce a glide after the s. At least those dialects should have had yod-coalescence. This yod is unlikely to be a recent innovation, because that would raise the question of where a rogue u came from that was unaffected by the great vowel shift.

Can anyone shed a little light on this mystery for me?

Travis B. wrote: ↑Tue Jan 21, 2025 8:08 pm

Linguoboy wrote: ↑Tue Jan 21, 2025 7:54 pm

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.

Apparently many people with the cot-caught merger have little to no awareness that other people have such a distinction, as strange as it may seem to cot-caught-unmerged people like myself.

jcb wrote: ↑Tue Feb 18, 2025 1:59 pm Even after nearly two decades of learning about linguistics, I still struggle to hear the difference between /A/ and /O/ (and /a/ and /Q/ that other dialects have). How non-COT-CAUGHT mergerers do it on a daily basis still sorta baffles me.

sasasha wrote: ↑Tue Feb 18, 2025 2:07 pm

jcb wrote: ↑Tue Feb 18, 2025 1:59 pm Even after nearly two decades of learning about linguistics, I still struggle to hear the difference between /A/ and /O/ (and /a/ and /Q/ that other dialects have). How non-COT-CAUGHT mergerers do it on a daily basis still sorta baffles me.

It sort of comforts me that /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ still sound near identical to you, because of my different but somewhat relateable experience of learning Finnish and failing on a regular, long-term basis to hear accurately their /æ ɑ/ distinction, despite, of course, having one of my own. (The Finnish pair are generally a bit more central than mine.) I can hear it, but I often get tripped up trying to follow it (or produce it) in more rapid speech.

For me, FWIW, there’s a very significant length distinction betwen COT and CAUGHT.

jcb wrote: ↑Tue Feb 18, 2025 2:24 pm

sasasha wrote: ↑Tue Feb 18, 2025 2:07 pm

jcb wrote: ↑Tue Feb 18, 2025 1:59 pm Even after nearly two decades of learning about linguistics, I still struggle to hear the difference between /A/ and /O/ (and /a/ and /Q/ that other dialects have). How non-COT-CAUGHT mergerers do it on a daily basis still sorta baffles me.

It sort of comforts me that /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ still sound near identical to you, because of my different but somewhat relateable experience of learning Finnish and failing on a regular, long-term basis to hear accurately their /æ ɑ/ distinction, despite, of course, having one of my own. (The Finnish pair are generally a bit more central than mine.) I can hear it, but I often get tripped up trying to follow it (or produce it) in more rapid speech.

For me, FWIW, there’s a very significant length distinction betwen COT and CAUGHT.

(1) And I'm even a native English speaker! (Just one that merges COT-CAUGHT.)
(2) If you asked me to distinguish between /A/ and /O/ in an isolated word (COT or CAUGHT) without any sentence context, I very probably wouldn't be able to do it with any greater chance than just guessing. I would only be able to do it reliably by remembering the spelling.
(3) Oh dear, another length distinction in some English dialect that I'm unaware of? How does this one work? (Mine are both short vowels.) (I just learned about the Scottish length rule/distinction in my BARD-BARRED thread.)

jcb wrote: ↑Tue Feb 18, 2025 1:59 pm Indeed, I thought that the spelling distinction between <o> and <au> was just an aesthetic spelling difference, like <ee> and <ea>, or <oCe> and <oa>, and nothing more. (Is there any dialect left in the English-speaking world that hasn't merged REED and READ, or LODE and LOAD?)

anteallach wrote: ↑Tue Feb 18, 2025 3:25 pm

jcb wrote: ↑Tue Feb 18, 2025 1:59 pm Indeed, I thought that the spelling distinction between <o> and <au> was just an aesthetic spelling difference, like <ee> and <ea>, or <oCe> and <oa>, and nothing more. (Is there any dialect left in the English-speaking world that hasn't merged REED and READ, or LODE and LOAD?)

I don't think <oCe> vs. <oa> reflects a historic pronunciation difference at all. The traditional local dialect where I am (which I don't speak) has a distinction between the reflex of Old English /ɑː/ and that of Old English /ɔ/ lengthened in open syllables in Middle English. You might think that these would be represented by <oa> and <oCe> respectively but that's not how it works: for example both coal and hole come from open syllable lengthening but whole and goal come from the OE long vowel.

(The local reflex of the one from open syllable lengthening, found in words like coal and hole, is a diphthong of the [ɔɪ] type. You might be aware of the odd example of this, because it's the reason for the oy in the surnames Boothroyd and Murgatroyd; AIUI this Yorkshire royd is cognate with the -rhoden in the Swiss canton names Appenzell Innerrhoden and Appenzell Ausserrhoden.)

Travis B. wrote: ↑Tue Jan 21, 2025 8:08 pm

Linguoboy wrote: ↑Tue Jan 21, 2025 7:54 pm

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.

Apparently many people with the cot-caught merger have little to no awareness that other people have such a distinction, as strange as it may seem to cot-caught-unmerged people like myself.

jcb wrote: ↑Wed Feb 19, 2025 3:55 pm

Travis B. wrote: ↑Tue Jan 21, 2025 8:08 pm

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.

Apparently many people with the cot-caught merger have little to no awareness that other people have such a distinction, as strange as it may seem to cot-caught-unmerged people like myself.

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?

sasasha wrote: ↑Tue Feb 18, 2025 8:13 am

Glass Half Baked wrote: ↑Tue Feb 18, 2025 5:31 am I have a question about yod-coalescence. In dialects with yod-coalescence, "sure" and "sugar" are pronounced with an SH sound. But "super" is not.
I have run through every reason for this I can think of, and have come up with nothing.
1. Could it be because super is a more recent loan? No. It is attested in Middle English, before yod-coalescence happened.
2. Maybe it just never had a palatal glide? No. Sugar and sure didn't have palatal glides originally either, but they acquired them through phonological processes that should have also happened to super.
3. Perhaps it lost its glide? No. Some dialects still pronounce a glide after the s. At least those dialects should have had yod-coalescence. This yod is unlikely to be a recent innovation, because that would raise the question of where a rogue u came from that was unaffected by the great vowel shift.

Can anyone shed a little light on this mystery for me?

I can’t fuly illuminate you... But I imagine it’s relevant that, for me, super shares /uː/ with soon, suitor etc., none of which have a palatal glide ‒ whereas sugar has /ʊ/ and sure /ɔː/ (RP /ʊ͜ə/).

In (very much) older/upper class British speech you might indeed hear glides in super and suitor, but never /ʃ/, and never (I think) in soon. Meanwhile I am quite certain I have never heard sugar with /sj/ rather than /ʃ/, even in old recordings, whilst for sure I have heard /sj/.

I don’t know off the top of my head precisely which conditions brought about the palatal glide on /uː/ or yod-coalescence, but I can tell you that sound change is lexically diffuse. Sound changes move through the lexicon in each idiolect spreading from word to word over time: it is not the case that a speaker suddenly produces glides in every /uː/ one day, or /ʃ/ in every word where they used to have /sj/.

The sociolinguistic factors that feed sound change sometimes shut down before the change completes diffusing through a lexicon. Sometimes they complete for some speakers / speech communities and not for others. Sometimes they get interrupted or reversed by other sound changes, again, for some, but not necessarily all, speech communities.

To my understanding, we often get left with these sorts of conundrums as a result.

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).

Travis B. wrote: ↑Wed Feb 19, 2025 5:46 pm

jcb wrote: ↑Wed Feb 19, 2025 3:55 pm

Travis B. wrote: ↑Tue Jan 21, 2025 8:08 pm
Apparently many people with the cot-caught merger have little to no awareness that other people have such a distinction, as strange as it may seem to cot-caught-unmerged people like myself.

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.