Zompist Bboard Again

From the Mizo thread:

Nortaneous wrote: ↑Sun Sep 15, 2019 11:31 am How did the Mizo /tr tl/ series develop? Checking STEDT, apparently they're from Pr Pl - so it's the same place neutralization as in Tibetan Pr > Ʈ and Vietnamese *Pr > s. (cf. the Puritan Dlory to God shift.)

I know some English dialects have or had /dl/ for /gl/, but what's specifically "Puritan" about it? John Wells transcribes a pronunciation of glasses in the Lancashire village he grew up in as [ˈdlasɪz].

Something similar seems to have happened in Dolomitic Ladin; there's a peak called "Piz Lech Dlace" which means peak of the ice lake or something like that (it's Eisseespitze in German).

The 1828 edition of Webster's Dictionary gave it as the normative pronunciation of <cl gl>:

The letters cl, answering to kl, are pronounced as if written tl; clear, clean, are pronounced tlear, tlean. Gl is pronounced dl; glory is pronounced dlory.

In 1887, Albert Tolman, a professor of English, wrote:

The extent to which initial cl (kl) and gl are pronounced as tl and dl is little appreciated. I graduated at a Massachusetts college under a President who talked about “our dlobe,” and the “dlory of God,” etc. I now sit under the preaching of a man, unusually careful and distinct in his articulation, who speaks in the same way.

So, Massachusetts, dlory of God -- Puritans!

As I just found out, Tolman went on to say:

When anyone has this lingualizing tendency so strongly that kr and gr are changed to tr and dr--as in track (for crack) and drace--some hearers are sure to notice it. We have all known persons whose articulation was otherwise correct who spoke in this way.

So there was another consonant shift that didn't reach fixation and was eventually reversed!

That suggests that it may have been more or less standard in the north-eastern US in the 19th century. Is there any trace of it left?

I wonder how connected it is to the Lancashire version. I don't think Lancashire dialects generally had much influence on North American ones, but it probably isn't/wasn't just Lancashire.

Any more interesting sound changes in these sources?

anteallach wrote: ↑Fri Sep 20, 2019 2:44 pm That suggests that it may have been more or less standard in the north-eastern US in the 19th century. Is there any trace of it left?

Not in the US.

Any more interesting sound changes in these sources?

I don't think it's in that same source, but a later edition of Webster's Dictionary prescribed the TRAP-BATH split, with a few differences ("ant" takes BATH) and notably without the merger of BATH into FATHER -- from the phonetic descriptions, the English of the time apparently contrasted /æ a ɑ ɒ ɔ/. This is still around, and is probably reflected in a very roundabout and simplified way in General American: in the northern Mid-Atlantic, BATH raised to /eə/, and simplification of the environment of the change is probably where GenAm æ-tensing came from. (This æ-tensing may now be marginally phonemic, since both [æ] and [eə] can occur before [ŋk]; an alternative is to analyze [æŋk eəŋk] as /aŋk ank/. This alternative is probably the true analysis, but it's less interesting and worse on general principle.)

Holy HELL how have I gone this long without knowing about this?!?!