ca'y

[Dennis R. Preston]

Rudy,

Many varieties of Irish English have intervocalic loss but
nonprevocalic preservation (in, for example, all the words you
mention below).
The underlying reporesentations could be very different (and allow
such a generalization). If "carry" is /kaer - riy/, then /r - r/
would be the distinct environment for such loss (certainly different
from /Vr/. On the other hand, even /kae - riy/ could provide a
distinct environment, /V - r/, which would allow /kae - iy/, with
appropriate subsequent vowel adjustment, but prevent /siy - uwdiy/,
for example, for "See Rudy" since it is /siy ## ruwdiy/ not /siy -
ruwdiy/ to begin with. (I haven't worked out the /#/ boundary for
this, and certainly not tried to differentiate among the types of
/#/, e.g., inflectional versus derivational, but I think they might
have no influence.)

I believe this discussion could be extended to /l/ "ball" /bawl/ -->
/baw:/ and, in some varieties, "Philip" /fIl - lIp/ --> /fI - Ip/,
although "interaction with nonprevocalic /l/-weakening (and loss and
other rules, incluiding those of vowel adjustment) could produce
alternatives, e.g., /fIwp/.

I guess I might withdraw my implicational remark for US dialects;
perhaps there are none where intervocalic /r/-loss does not imply
nonprevocalic /r/ loss (or, as you note, vocalization), but Irish
English cerainly makes it untrue for English in general.

dInIs (who always dislikes weak syllable loss since it makes him /dIns/)


>dInIs,
>
>         You grew up closer to the source than I did, but I don't think
>I've heard anyone "drop" the -/r/- in <carry> who didn't also vocalize it
>in final position, though Arnold argues that these are different. If it is
>syllabified as /kaer-iy/, the two fall together. Or could there be a
>re-etymologization of this as <care> + <y>? Is the -/r/- dropped in Larry,
>Mary, leary, berry, bury, sorry? I've often seen <carry> represented as
>"ca'y" in transcriptions of AAVE, but don't recall other examples (one
>exception: <ta'pin> for <terrapin>).
>
>         Rudy

--
Dennis R. Preston
Department of Linguistics and Languages
Michigan State University
East Lansing MI 48824-1027 USA
preston at pilot.msu.edu
Office: (517)353-0740
Fax: (517)432-2736