hl-cluster, hr-cluster and hn-cluster reductions

Y-cluster reductions

Yod-dropping

Yod-dropping is the elision of the sound . The term comes from the Hebrew letter yod, pronounced as .

Yod-dropping before occurs in most varieties of English in the following environments:

• After , for example chew , juice , yew
• After , for example rude
• After consonant+ clusters, for example blue

There are accents, for example Welsh English, in which pairs like chews/choose, yew/you, threw/through are distinct: the first member of each pair has the diphthong while the second member has .

Many varieties of English have extended yod dropping to the following environments, on condition that the be in the same syllable as the preceding consonant:

• After , for example suit
• After , for example lute
• After , for example Zeus
• After , for example enthusiasm

However, in words like annual, menu, volume, Matthew, continue, etc., where there is a syllable break before the , there is no yod dropping.

Yod-dropping in the above environments was formerly considered nonstandard in England, but today it is heard even among well-educated RP speakers. In General American yod-dropping is found not only in the above environments but also:

• After , and , for example tune , dew , new

General American thus undergoes yod-dropping after all alveolar consonants. Some accents of Southern American English preserve the distinction in pairs like loot/lute and do/dew by using a diphthong in words where RP has , thus , etc.

Some East Anglian accents extend yod-dropping not only to the position after , or , but to the position after nonalveolar consonants as well, so that pairs like pure/poor, beauty/booty, mute/moot, cute/coot are homophonous.

In yod-pronouncing dialects, the spellings eu, ew, uCe, ue and ui, as in feud, few, mute, cue and suit generally indicate /ju:/ or , while the spellings oo and ou, as in moon and soup generally indicate /u:/.

Yod-coalescence

Related to yod-dropping is the phenomenon of yod coalescence. This is a process that occurs in almost all accents in unstressed syllables, as in nature and pressure and occurs in some accents in stressed syllables too as in tune and dune. The process changes the clusters , , and into , , and respectively.

Other initial cluster reductions

Rap-wrap merger

The rap-wrap merger is a reduction occurring in most dialects of English that causes the initial cluster to be reduced to , making rap and wrap, rite and write etc. homophones. This reduction occurs in all dialects of present English.

Old English had a contrast between and , the former characterized by lip rounding. In Middle English, the contrast disappeared and all cases of initial came to be rounded.

Not-knot merger

The not-knot merger is a reduction that occurs in modern English where the historical cluster /kn/ is reduced to /n/ making knot and not homophones. This reduction is complete in present English, although it has not happened in all varieties of Scots.http://www1.uni-hamburg.de/peter.siemund/Articles/English%20(Variationstypologie).pdf. Quote: "ScotE is well-known for being more conservative than SBE and hence has retained many of the original features. Among these are the use of the velar fricative /x/ (cf. night, daughter, loch) the voiceless labial fricative /hw/ (cf. where, when, whine) and the retention of certain consonant clusters which are not possible in SBE: /kn/ as in knee, knock."

There is a respectable list of words in Modern English that begin with kn, including knife, knave, knead, knee, knell, knight, knit, knock, knot, know, knuckle, and others.

All of the kn words stem from Old English forms beginning with cn- (the orthographic change from c to k, which began with the influence of Norman French spelling, is outside the scope of the current discussion), and at the time all were pronounced with an initial /k/ sound before the /n/. These words were common to the Germanic languages, most of which still pronounce the initial /k/. Thus, for example, the Old English ancestor of knee was cnēo, pronounced and the cognate word in Modern German is Knie, pronounced .

Most dialects of English reduced the initial cluster /kn/ to /n/ relatively recently--the change seems to have taken place in educated English during the seventeenth century, meaning that Shakespeare did not have the reduction.

Nome-gnome merger

S-cluster reduction

• Spit - 'pit
• Stomach - 'tomach
• Spend - 'pen
• Squeeze - 'queeze

Final cluster reductions

Nonstandard final consonant cluster reduction

Final consonant cluster reduction is the nonstandard reduction of final consonant clusters in English occurring in African American Vernacular English and Caribbean English.

Examples are:

• test - tes'
• desk - des'
• hand - han'
• send - sen'
• left - lef'
• wasp - was'

The plural of test and desk become tesses and desses by the same English rule that gives us plural messes from singular mess.http://www.rehabmed.ualberta.ca/spa/phonology/Features.htmlhttp://www.indiana.edu/~hlw/PhonProcess/accents.htmlhttp://courses.essex.ac.uk/lg/lg449/AAVEfeatureList.htmhttp://www.stanford.edu/~rickford/ebonics/EbonicsExamples.html

Plum-plumb merger

S-cluster metathesis

For AAVE speakers with S-cluster metathesis the following words can undergo the following changes:

• ask → aks
• grasp → graps
• wasp → waps
• gasp → gaps

S-cluster metathesis is lexically determined.

The above pronunciations in fact have a long history, and all the metathesised forms have existed in English for around as long as the words themselves, with varying degrees of acceptance. For example, the Old English verb áscian also appeared as acsian, and both forms continued into Middle English.

The two forms co-existed and evolved separately in various regions of England, and later America. The variant ascian gives us the modern standard English ask, but the form "axe", probably derived from Old English acsian, appears in Chaucer: "I axe, why the fyfte man Was nought housband to the Samaritan?" (Wife of Bath's Prologue, 1386.) It was considered acceptable in literary English until about 1600 http://www.etymonline.com and can still be found in some dialects of English including, of course, African American Vernacular English. It is, however, one of the most stigmatized features of AAVE, often commented on by teachers.

Yod-rhotacization

• beautiful -
• cute -
• music -

Scream-stream merger

This phonological pattern in AAVE is a phonological pattern that's been mentioned from time to time, often by speech pathologists. Presumably the speech pathologists were concerned about this use of "skr" in place of standard English "str" because it was not clear whether the combination of sounds was an indication of a disorder or dialectal pattern. Still the scream-stream merger has not been observed or recorded in the literature nearly as often as other sound patterns. There are three possible reasons for this: (1) One is that because "skr" only occurs in positions where "str" can occur in general American English, there will be limited opportunity to produce the sound. (2) Secondly, the scream-stream merger may be viewed as a feature of the speech of young AAVE speakers that is not maintained in adult AAVE. (3) Thirdly, the scream-stream merger may be associated with AAVE spoken in certain regions of the United States.

Common words in which the /sk/ sequence occurs are given below:

• "street" = /skrit/

In summarizing her research on the cluster, Dandy (1991) notes that the form is found in Gullah and in the speech of some young African Americans born in the Southern United States. She explains that the stream-scream merger is a highly stigmatized feature and that many of the students in her study who used it were referred to speech pathologists. She goes on to note the following about her research: "I also found a continuum that may indicate sound change in progress. If children said skretch for stretch, they probably have used the skr alternation in other words that contained the feature: skreet for street, skrong for strong, skrike for strike, skranger/deskroy for stranger/destroy. There were some who said skreet for street but did not make alteration on other words with that sound". (p. 44). Also, although Dandy does not make this point, it is important to note that the students' use of /skr/ may have been affected by the training they were getting from the speech pathologists.

See also

• Phonological history of the English language
• Phonological history of English consonants
  • G-dropping
  • H-dropping

References