"Shev-uh-lay"

[Jim Parish]

I wrote:
> 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'?

Laurence Horn replied:
> 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]?

Hmm. You may be right; I wasn't focusing as much on "syllable-initial"
as on "not syllable-final". In any case, yes, I can certainly "hear"
(although I'm not sure I've ever actually heard) "ev'abody". I think that
part of what bothered me is that the second syllable, as Croce
pronounces it, is relatively strong, but that may be an artifact of the
phonetic constraints of singing.

Jim Parish