r to l dissimilation in infrastructure?

Wed Jul 2 15:04:55 UTC 2008

In  the other direction, I hear "chir-dren" for children every now & then.
One of the newsreaders on NPR (name
escapes me at the moment) says this fairly clearly.
AM

Original Message:
-----------------
From: Herb Stahlke hfwstahlke at GMAIL.COM
Date: Tue, 1 Jul 2008 20:27:03 -0400
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: r to l dissimilation in "infrastructure"?

"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:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
-----------------------
> 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
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

--------------------------------------------------------------------
mail2web.com – What can On Demand Business Solutions do for you?
http://link.mail2web.com/Business/SharePoint

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org