Schtupp in the name of love

I was visiting with a former professor this weekend. She's not a linguist but she is very well acquainted with IPA transcription. She frequently teaches communications and speech and she often incorporates units on transcribing speech.

We were speaking of aural "blind spots" and common mistakes of novice scribes. Some vowels are very difficult to differentiate such as the [a]/[ɔ] distinction (especially for the cot/caught mergers that have overrun her campus) and some spelling conventions are difficult to put aside (such as the 'g' that some students try to put after every [ŋ]).

She also noted an emerging allophone in the speech of some students. She has noticed a trend towards a post-alveolar voiceless fricative [ʃ] before [t]. Right after mentioning this the conversation was interrupted and I was left to sit in the corner muttering [ʃt ʃt ʃt...] to myself. Such moments are common.

Buffy will say to me "you never listen to what I'm saying" and I fade into a trance. My mantra [vɻlɪsn̩ vɻlɨsɨn vɻləsən...]

Several minutes later (perhaps about an hour) I approached my former professor (now friend) and asked her if there was any specific environment in which she noticed this post-alveolar. My guess was that it would not occur in the words steep stick or stop but it would show up in strength string and strange because of the following retroflex.

An interesting co-occurrence of features is the labialization (lip rounding) of the initial approximant [ɹ] even before front vowels and the similar labialisation of initial [ʃ]. Is it possible that the concurrent labial feature as could influence a non-labialized phoneme [s] to resemble a very similar phoneme [ʃ] that does take lip-rounding.

She wasn't sure of a more specific environment but she did promise to listen for it. I don't remember seeing this alternation mentioned but I'll be listening for it very intently now. I really doubt that it's at all related to the pre-consonantal palatalization that we sometimes see in strudel and which is increasingly present in smorgasboard.

Where have all the good glides gone?

I was watching the end of a House MD rerun and I got lost regarding the plot. So I looked online for the script and found it pretty easily. Reading through it I came across the following lines. A young girl (Kama) is asking the doctor (Foreman) about her brother's prognosis:

KAMA: Is he gonna die?

[Foreman looks at her.]

FOREMAN: No. No one's gonna die.

KAMA: [smart-ass] In the whole world ever? That's so great.

FOREMAN: [chuckles] I meant...

KAMA: I know what you meant. But I also know bad things do happen. My dad always had a few drinks whenever he went out. Always said it'd be okay to drive. [shrugs sadly] Until it wasn't. I would just like some mourning this time.

[Foreman looks at Kama, sympathetically.]

FOREMAN: We're nowhere near anything like that happening right now.

It's an odd wish that Kama has for "some mourning." I though maybe the story was about having to rush through a loss and the poor girl never had a chance to mourn her father's death. So she wanted to know ahead of time if her brother was going to die so that she'd...

Oh. Yeah. That makes more sense. Some warning.

The two phrases are often identical. After some consonants it's common for a [w] to be deleted. As evidenced by the some warning/some mourning confusion the deletion can even occur across a word boundary. Between the labial [m] and rounded [ɔ] is an especially suitable environment for w-deletion. It can be hard to distinguish between some more and some wore (except that the former is usually an iamb and the latter is often a trochee). And we sometimes find this deletion after other consonants in words like towards [tɔrdz] and quarter [kɔɻɾɻ]. These words can still be pronounced either with or without the [w], while sword lost it permanently long ago (except in the not-so-common spelling pronunciation).

Of course there are several words in which the deletion does not occur. Before a front unrounded vowel the [w] stays put in tweed switch square and quack. If a speaker pronounces quartz with a distinctly low and unrounded [a] my guess is that the [w] is regularly preserved. I've never heard the mineral pronounced identically to carts.

I'm not prepared to give an answer to the question that I now pose: why did sword lose the [w] while swore has kept it? Usually we look to the original language or the time of adoption to help with an explanation. Because both words have been with the language since it was Old English that doesn't give us much help. It may have something to do with the preservation of a front vowel in swear. By analogy with a related form the [w] could have been preserved by kinship.

But that's only a primary suggestion and I'm happy to hear a more informed explanation.

Approximating season

In a comment a while back Nancy Friedman mentioned some voting options she found on the Overheard in New York site. She wrote

Also note that you can vote for the Overheard quotes. Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down, and WTF? need no explanation. But I had to Google "Alsome," which turns out to be the way the REALLY cool folks say and spell "awesome." (Well, spell it anyway. I'm not sure the two words are pronounced very differently. Hey, Linguist Guy, whaddya think?)

I think some people might pronounce it with an [l] or more likely one of the darker L's--either a velarized alveolar lateral approximant [ɫ] or the velar lateral approximant [ʟ].

English commonly uses the dark-l in a coda position and the light-l in an onset. The usual transcription of the dark-l indicates that velarization is a secondary articulation. [l] is an alveolar consonant and is articulated with the tip of the tongue against the alveolar ridge. Velarization means that in a secondary articulation the back of the tongue is also raised giving it a 'dark' sound. Compare the first and second L in little. Or the L in light with the L in call. The difference is indicated by the tilde that runs through the symbol [ɫ]. [liɾɫ̩] [lait] [kaɫ]

The velar lateral approximant is primarily velar and so the raised back of the tongue (the dorsum, think the dorsal fin on the back of a fish) is the primary articulation. The tip of the tongue isn't the main indicator of place. Although this is not a standard phone in English it does occur in some accents and some pronunciations as when a coda L is left markedly open. In fast speech the L in a phrase like 'all of them' might remain completely dorsal without any alveolar articulation.

Consider how close to 'awvem' that can sound. Now consider that some dialects will pronounce L's like W's. Ever heard someone say 'widow' instead of 'little'? It's a common early pronunciation among children because the sounds are similar acoustically. I know one child who pronounced 'flower' like 'wallow'--a complete reversal of the [l] and [w] approximants. Tho this might have been metathesis instead of an articulation issue.

Just earlier today I heard 'saw' pronounced before a vowel like 'sawl'. It was overheard only once so I'm not sure if it was a velar lateral or a velarized alveolar lateral, but it was definitely an approximant. I've heard it before. I asked a friend if she hears this a lot around here in Nebraska. She rolled her eyes and gave an exasperated "Ugh. Yes."

Before a vowel it's very much like I sawr 'im leaving which we would expect to hear in some northeastern American dialects. The approximant makes a nice onset for the following syllable.

I imagine also that to those who are used to hearing [ɑ] in 'awesome' the northeastern closing and rounding and raising to [ɔ] could be interpreted the same as a velar approximation.

Whatever the process there are plenty of likely explanations for the awesome/alsome alternation.