"Drouth"

[Dennis Preston]

Well, to be a bit facetious, one could argue that almost all "wh"
words are misspelling pronunciations. Since French scribes did not
like the looks of Old English "hw," they modified it to "wh." Perhaps
that misspelling is the cause the /w/ mispronunciation and the tragic
phoneme loss.

Relatedly, Miklos Kontra claims that the layout of the Hungarian
typewriter keyboard is one of the influences on the merger of two
mid-front vowels in Hungarian.

dInIs



>---------------------- Information from the mail header
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>Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>Poster:       Charles Doyle <cdoyle at UGA.EDU>
>Subject:      Re: "Drouth"
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>Some 35 years ago a friend--a learned linguist who has since become
>eminent in the field--heard me pronounce "height" with a theta at
>the end. He hypothesized that mine was a "misspelling
>pronunciation"--that I had visualized the word with the final "h"
>and "t" interchanged, and then pronounced it accordingly.
>
>In fact, of course, the /-T/ form of "height," like the /-T/ form of
>"drought," has alternated with the /-t/ form for many centuries (in
>both pronunciation and spelling). But I have, ever since that
>conversation, been intrigued by the concept of "misspelling
>pronunciations." What might real examples be? With most of the words
>that our students ubiquitously misspell, like "occurrence" and
>"separate," pronunciation would not be affected (or, rather, the
>misspelling is based on the phonology).
>
>--Charlie
>_____________________________________________________________
>
>
>
>---- Original message ----
>>Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2007 09:23:37 -0500
>>From: Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
>>
>>"Drouth" doesn't look odd, Charlie!. It looks like an old friend!
>>It's the same with "height." We spell it "height," but we pronounce
>>it "high-th." That's pure-dee East-Texan! "Drought" is like some
>>weird pronunciation-spelling.
>>
>>-Wilson
>
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--
Dennis R. Preston
University Distinguished Professor
Department of English
Morrill Hall 15-C
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48864 USA

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