r to l dissimilation in "infrastructure"?

[Herb Stahlke]

"fluster" and, in the other direction, "purple."

Herb

On Tue, Jul 1, 2008 at 1:56 PM, Arnold M. Zwicky
<zwicky at csli.stanford.edu> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: r to l dissimilation in "infrastructure"?
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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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