"Shev-uh-lay"

[Laurence Horn]

>In Jim Croce's "Rapid Roy", there is a line which refers to "a dirt-track
>demon in a '57 Chevrolet". Croce quite clearly pronounces the last word
>without an 'r': "shev-uh-lay". (I'm not up on asciified IPA; sorry.) I don't
>recall hearing that pronunciation anywhere else. Has anyone on-list? If
>so, where (geographically or socially) does it occur, and are there other
>examples of dropped syllable-initial 'r'?
>
>Jim Parish

But is the /r/ really syllable-initial?  I think it's not so much the
dropping of a syllable-initial /r/ but the simplification (natural
enough, especially in fast/colloquial style) of a /vr/ cluster, which
facilitates resyllabification as [SE.v at .'le] (Or maybe the /v/ ends
up phonetically as ambisyllabic?  My phonetician colleagues are out
of town.)  I can imagine "everybody" undergoing the same
simplification, resulting in "ev'ybody" or "ev'abody", despite the
fact that we might regard the underlying form as involving a
syllable-initial /r/ there as well.  And how about "average" as
['aev at j]?

Larry