Phonological history of English fricatives and affricates

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1 H-dropping and h-adding
- 1.1 H-dropping
- 1.2 H-adding
2 Velar fricatives
3 Dental fricatives
4 Initial fricative voicing
5 S-retraction
6 Seal-zeal merger
7 Pleasure-pressure merger
8 Sip-ship merger
9 Ship-chip merger
10 Zip-gyp merger
11 See also
12 References

[edit] H-dropping and h-adding

[edit] H-dropping

H-dropping is a linguistic term used to describe the omission of initial /h/ in words like house, heat, and hangover in many dialects of English, such as Cockney and Estuary English. The same phenomenon occurs in many other languages, such as Serbian, and Late Latin, the ancestor of the modern Romance languages. Interestingly, both French and Spanish acquired new initial [h] in mediæval times, but these were later lost in both languages in a "second round" of h-dropping (however it should be noted that some dialects of Spanish re-acquired 'h' from Spanish 'x'). Many dialects of Dutch also feature h-dropping, particularly the south western variants. It is also known from several Scandinavian dialects, for instance Älvdalsmål.

H-dropping in English is found in all dialects in the weak forms of function words like he, him, her, his, had, and have; and, in most dialects, in all forms of the pronoun it — the older form hit survives as the strong form in a few dialects such as Southern American English and also occurs in the Scots language. Because the /h/ of unstressed have is usually dropped, the word is usually pronounced /əv/ in phrases like should have, would have, and could have.

See also

List of h-dropping homophones

[edit] H-adding

The opposite of h-dropping, so-called h-adding, is a hypercorrection found in typically h-dropping accents of English. A classist stereotype, commonly found in literature from late Victorian times to the early 20^th century, holds that some lower-class people consistently drop h in words that should have it, while adding h to words that should not have it. An example from the musical My Fair Lady is, "In 'Artford, 'Ereford, and 'Ampshire, 'urricanes 'ardly hever 'appen". In practice, however, it would appear that h-adding is more of a stylistic prosodic effect, being found on some words receiving particular emphasis, regardless of whether those words are h-initial or vowel-initial in the standard language.

Words borrowed from French frequently begin with the letter h but not with the sound /h/. Examples include hour, heir, hors d'oeuvre, honour and honest. In some cases, spelling pronunciation has introduced the sound /h/ into such words, as in humble, hotel and (for most speakers) historic. Spelling pronunciation has also added /h/ to the English English pronunciation of herb, /hɜːb/, while American English retains the older pronunciation /ɝb/.

[edit] Velar fricatives

[edit] Taut-taught merger

The taut-taught merger is a process that occurs in modern English that causes /x/ to be dropped in words like thought, night, daughter etc.^[1]^[2]^[3]

The phoneme /x/ was previously distinguished as [ç] after front vowels, [x] after back vowels. [ç] and sometimes [x] was lost in most dialects with compensatory lengthening of the previous vowels. /nɪxt/ [nɪçt] > /niːt/, later > /naɪt/ "night" by the Great Vowel Shift.

/x/ sometimes became /f/, with shortening of previous vowel.

Inconsistent development of [x] combined with ambiguity of ou (either /ou/ or /uː/ in Early Middle English) produced multiple reflexes of orthographic ough. Compare Modern English through /θruː/, though /ðoʊ/, bough /baʊ/, cough /kɒf/ or /kɑf/, rough /rʌf/.

The spelling gh that occurs in current orthography usually indicates that in Middle English the word in question had a velar fricative /x/ in the pronunciation. During the sixteenth century, this fricative was still pronounced, in some circles at least; by the seventeenth century it had disappeared in the precursor of RP, except that in some cases /x/ had been switch instead to a labiodental, /f/. Hence the spelling gh is now either silent, as in right, high, eight, bough, dough, daughter, through, or else corresponds to /f/, as in cough, rough, laugh, tough etc. The resulting multiplicity of pronunciations corresponding to orthographical ough is notorious.

In traditional-dialect of the north of England and Scotland, /x/ may remain in many of the words in which it was found in Middle English. Where it does not remain as such, it often happens that it yielded /f/ in items where standard English has zero consonant, or vice versa. Hence on the one hand we have the stereotype Scots phrase bricht moonlicht nicht (for bright moonlight night; compare standard /braɪt/ etc.), and on the other hand occasional relic forms such as [trɒx] for trough (RP /trɒf/) and [lɪçt] for light, recorded by SED in southern West Yorkshire (at localities y30 and y21 respectively). In both cases the local accent (as opposed to traditional-dialect) lacks /x/.

Quite apart from traditional dialect, a fair number of names in the Celtic countries contain /x/ in the local pronunciation. This is the case with Buchan and Auchtermuchty in Scotland, Amlwch /-lʊx/ and Loughor /lʊxə/ in Wales. A more English, less Celtic pronunciation commonly involves the replacement of this /x/ by /k/: English people and other outsiders call Buchan /bʌkən/. In Ireland /h/ is common corresponding to putative earlier /x/, as in Donaghee, Haughey, though some speakers do have a /x/ there. Thus there is a sense in which the consonant system even in Standard English, as pronounced in the Celtic countries, includes /x/, whether as a residualism going back to Middle English /x/ or as a loan phoneme from Scottish Gaelic, Welsh or Irish.

Even in England /x/ can be said to hold a tenuous and marginal position in the consonant system of educated speakers, though certainly no longer found in Standard English in words which contained it in Middle English. Here it is clearly a loan-phoneme.

Many people know of the word loch and its Scottish guttural sound. The composer Bach is often called [bɑːx]; the vowel [ɑː] does not perfectly reflect the German short [a], but the consonant matches the German pronunciation fairly well. Some English people, too, will attempt an [x] in surnames of Celtic origin such as MacLachlan. The hyperforeignism [mjuːnɪx] for Munich is very common; [xl] is also familiar as an attempt to pronounce the Welsh [ɬ], as in Llangollen.

A velar or uvular fricative has also been taken into South African English along with Afrikaans words containing it; as gogga /xɒxə/.

Some accents in northern England show slightly different changes, for example, night as /niːt/ and in the dialectal words owt and nowt (from aught and naught, pronounced like out and nout). Also, in Northern England, the distinction between wait and weight is often preserved, so those speakers lack the wait-weight merger.

[edit] Wait-weight merger

The wait-weight merger is the merger of the Middle English sound sequences /ɛi/ (as in wait) and /ɛix/ (as in weight) that occurs in most dialects of English. ^[4]

The main exceptions are in Northern England, for example in many Yorkshire accents, where these sequences are often kept distinct, so that wait /weːt/ is distinct from weight /wɛɪt/ and late /leːt/ does not rhyme with eight [ɛɪt].

The distinction between wait and weight is an old one that goes back to a diphthongisation of Middle English /ɛ/ before the fricative /x/ which was represented by gh in English. So in words like weight /ɛ/ became /ɛɪ/ and subsequently /x/ was lost as in Standard English, but the diphthong remained.

Wait on the other hand is a Norman French loan word (which in turn was a Germanic loan) and had the Middle English diphthong [ai] that was also found in words like day. This diphthong merged with the reflex of Middle English /aː/ (as in late) and both ended up as /eː/ in the accents of parts of northern England, hence the distinction wait /weːt/ vs. weight /wɛɪt/.

[edit] Lock-loch merger

The lock-loch merger is a phonemic merger of /k/ and /x/ that is starting to occur in some Scottish English dialects, making lock and loch homonyms as /lɔk/. Many other varieties of English have borrowed foreign and Scottish /x/ as /k/, and so not all people who pronounce "lock" and "loch" alike exhibit the merger.^[5]^[6]

The English spoken in Scotland has traditionally been known for having an extra consonant sound /x/, but that is starting to disappear among some younger speakers in Glasgow.

The observations of the merger happening were investigated by auditory and acoustic analysis for a sample of the children from Glasgow pronouncing words that traditionally have /x/ in Scottish English.

[edit] Dental fricatives

Main article Pronunciation of English th

See also

The then-thyn split was a phonemic split of the Old English phoneme /θ/ into two phonemes /ð/ and /θ/ occurring in Early Middle English which resulted in then and thyn (thin)'s starting with different initial consonant, /ð/ and /θ/.
Th-fronting is a merger that occurs (historically independently) in Cockney, Newfoundland English, African American Vernacular English, and Liberian English (though the details differ among those accents), by which Early Modern English /θ, ð/ merge with /f, v/.
Th-stopping is the realization of the dental fricatives [θ, ð] as stops, which occurs in several dialects of English.
Th-alveolarization is the pronunciation of the dental fricatives /θ, ð/ as the alveolar fricatives /s, z/
Th-debuccalization is the pronunciation of the dental fricative /θ/ as the glottal fricative /h/ when it occurs at the beginning of a word or intervocalically, occurring in many varieties of Scottish English.

[edit] Initial fricative voicing

Initial fricative voicing is a process that occurs in the West Country where the fricatives /s/, /f/, /θ/ and /ʃ/ are voiced to /z/, /v/, /ð/ and /ʒ/ when they occur at the beginning of a word. In these accents, sing and farm are pronounced /zɪŋ/ and /vɑːrm/.

A similar phenomenon happened in both German and Dutch.

[edit] S-retraction

S-retraction is a process where "s" is pronounced as a retracted variant of [s] auditorily closer to [ʃ]. S-retraction occurs in Glaswegian, in Scotland.^[7]

[edit] Seal-zeal merger

Seal-zeal merger is a phenomenon occurring in Hong Kong English where the phonemes /s/ and /z/ are both pronounced /s/ making pairs like "seal" and "zeal", and "racing" and "razing" homonyms.^[8]

[edit] Pleasure-pressure merger

Pleasure-pressure merger is a phenomenon occurring in Hong Kong English where the phonemes /ʃ/ and /ʒ/ are both pronounced /ʃ/ making "pleasure" and "pressure" rhyme.^[9]

[edit] Sip-ship merger

The sip-ship merger is a phenomenon occurring in some Asian and African varieties of English where the phonemes /s/ and /ʃ/ are not distinguished. As a result, pairs like "sip" and "ship", "sue" and "shoe" etc. are homophones.^[10]

In the cartoon series, South Park, this pronunciation is made fun of by recurring character Tuong Lu Kim's distinctive pronunciation of the word, "city".

[edit] Ship-chip merger

The ship-chip merger is phenomenon occurring for some speakers of Zulu English where the phonemes /ʃ/ and /tʃ/ are not distinguished. As a result, "ship" and "chip" are homophones.^[11]

[edit] Zip-gyp merger

The zip-gyp merger is a phenomenon occurring for some speakers of Indian English where /z/ and /dʒ/ are not distinguished, making "zip" and "gyp" homophonous as /zɪp/, and "bridges" sound like /brɪzɪz/.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

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