r to l dissimilation in "infrastructure"?

Tue Jul 1 17:56:06 UTC 2008

On Jul 1, 2008, at 10:19 AM, Nancy Hall wrote:

> The reason that I was eliciting 'infrastructure' was to see what
> percentage
> of speakers drop the first [r], as part of a study of r-dissimilation.
> Substituting [l] for [r] could be an alternate method of r-
> dissimilation, so
> it would be quite interesting if this is an established variant.

googling on "inflastructure" got me 121 hits (reduced from 304), some
of which seem to come from native speakers and look intentional.

i'm sure i've seen other examples of (anticipatory) r > l
dissimilation in english (the textbook example is post-classical latin
peregri:nus > pelegrinus -- eventually pilgrim in english), but i
can't at the moment recall them.

arnold

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