/hy/

[Gordon, Matthew J.]

WRT your original question, Tollfree reports /h/ deletion in huge, et al. as an option for Southeast London speakers in her contribution to the _Urban Voices_ collection (Foulkes and Docherty, 1999). She also notes that Sivertson found "only /j/ for /hj/" in _Cockney Phonology_ (1960). 



-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society on behalf of Dennis R. Preston
Sent: Thu 5/19/2005 2:56 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject:      Re: /hy/
 
Damien,

You mean to say you would drop /h/ prevocalically BEFORE you would
drop in pre /y/? I find this counterintuitive.

dInIa



>dInIs,
>
>You wrote:
>
>'Is the cluster /hy/ reduced to /y/ in lower-status London (England,
>not Kentucky) speech? That is, is "huge" pronounced "yuge"? My handy
>sources are silent on this. Reference?'
>
>I haven't got a reference for you, but as a native I can tell you that
>lower-status London speech does reduce /hy/ to /y/ in 'huge'.  As far as I can
>tell it's part of the general tendency to 'drop your aitches', which I do
>myself when I'm not speaking carefully, though if introspection is worth
>anything I don't actually do it for /hy/, I don't think.
>Interesting.  Perhaps
>there's a hierarchy involved where the commoner /h-/ onsets (/hI-/, /ha-/,
>/ho(w)-/) are (far) more likely to have their aitch dropped than the
>lower-frequency ones?  For example, I can easily visualise a Cockney saying
>
>" 'Ere, 'old this 'uge pot a second.  Careful, it's 'ot!"
>
>and I think that I myself (middle-class, West London, definitely not
>a Cockney)
>could / would drop all those aitches except the one in "'uge".  Speaking very
>casually, I might even drop them all in the same sentence.
>
>[Other 'droppings' have been left in in the example above, for clarity:  'pot'
>and 'hot' would actualy also drop their /t/, so
>/pot/ > /po?/  (/?/ = glottal stop)
>/hot/ > /(?)o?/
>]
>
>But I'm talking about my own idiolect alone, so I'll stop.
>
>Damien Hall
>University of Pennsylvania


--
Dennis R. Preston
University Distinguished Professor
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        Asian and African Languages
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