question on pronunciation in Jespersen

[Gordon, Matthew J.]

My guess this is related to the traditional British (and American) pronunciation using the lax vowel [I] in words with  unstressed final -y (e.g. happy, lucky). Wells, in _Accents of English_, describes the change to the tense vowel [i], which he memorably labels "HAPPY Tensing", as one that has taken place in both British and American English in the second half of the 20th cen.

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From:   American Dialect Society on behalf of Stahlke, Herbert F.W.
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Subject:             question on pronunciation in Jespersen

In a section on the suffices -Vnce and -Vncy, Jespersen writes, "A good deal of vacillation between -nce and -ncy may partly be attributed to the fact that the plurals -nces and -ncies are identical in sound, e. g. inadvertences = inadvertencies, impertinences = impertinencies."  I have never noticed.  To me the pronunciations are distinct.  Would this be a first-half of the 20th c. British pronunciation?


Herb