Popsicle

[Paul Johnston]

I went to school with a guy named Jack Hodgson, and it was always
[hAdZs at n].  Same in Northern England, where the name comes from.

Paul Johnston
On Apr 5, 2010, at 11:23 AM, Damien Hall wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Damien Hall <djh514 at YORK.AC.UK>
> Subject:      Popsicle
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> ---------
>
> Larry and Paul commented on the non-pronunciation of the /s/ in
> 'Fudgesicle'. Possibly it is dialectal, but isn't the simplest
> explanation
> phonetic / phonological? It seems to me very likely that in a
> sequence of
>
> affricate /J/ + fricative /s/
>
> - which could be simplified to
>
> (/d/ +) voiced fricative /Z/ + fricative /s/
>
> one of the two will get elided, at least in fast speech. If you
> believe in
> the Obligatory Contour Principle (not saying I don't, but not everyone
> does!), that would be one way of describing it.
>
> That's the phonology, but in my view English phonetics make it almost
> inevitable that one of these two phonemes will be elided in fast
> speech.
> It's clear that English final voiced consonants are often / usually
> not
> really voiced if you look at them on a spectrogram: usually the only
> difference between 'sinch' and 'singe' is in the length of the
> vowel, which
> is longer before the notionally- / phonologically-voiced consonant in
> 'singe', while both final consonants are voiceless. So for
> 'fudge' (though
> I haven't done the spectrogram to check). I would expect that the
> final
> consonant of 'fudge' would be [tS], the same as the final consonant of
> 'futch'.* If this is so, then we have
>
> [S] + [s]
>
> in the middle of 'fudgesicle', and I think that, if you say it
> fast, even
> if you are saying both consonants, it's very difficult for the
> listener to
> tell. It therefore sounds like 'fudgicle', and it's a short step
> from it
> sounding like that to people actually making that their target
> pronunciation and spelling it accordingly.
>
> * I know that there's a little, ahem, fudging of the argument here,
> since
> the final consonant of 'fudge' isn't word-final in 'fudgesicle';
> but isn't
> it likely that people analyse it as if it _were_ word-final, and
> therefore
> final devoicing applies (turning 'fudge' to 'futch'), since the
> 'fudge'
> syllable is only there in 'fudgesicle' because it is a word in its own
> right?
>
> Damien
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Date:    Sun, 4 Apr 2010 17:26:44 -0400
> From:    Paul Johnston <paul.johnston at WMICH.EDU>
> Subject: Re: Popsicle
>
> I (and my parents)said that too!  Maybe Fudgicle is a Northeastern
> thing.
>
> Paul Johnston
> On Apr 4, 2010, at 11:09 AM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>> -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
>> Subject:      Re: Fwd: Re: Popsicle
>> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>> -
>> ---------
>>
>> At 1:17 AM -0400 4/4/10, victor steinbok wrote:
>>> I am still trying to figure out why there are so many references to
>>> Epperson coining Creamsicle, Fudgesicle, etc.
>>>
>> Was it just me and people I knew who never pronounced the "s" in the
>> latter?  It was always "Fudgicle", and I was surprised the first time
>> I read the package to see that it was technically "Fudgesicle".  No
>> such problems with the other (cream, corpse) varieties.  I guess if
>> we start from "icicle" the process is similar to that for the
>> -((c)o)holic family.
>>
>> LH
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
>
> --
> Damien Hall
>
> University of York
> Department of Language and Linguistic Science
> Heslington
> YORK
> YO10 5DD
> UK
>
> Tel. (office) +44 (0)1904 432665
>      (mobile) +44 (0)771 853 5634
> Fax  +44 (0)1904 432673
>
> http://www.york.ac.uk/res/aiseb
>
> http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/lang/people/pages/hall.htm
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org