A nice Southernism . . .

[LanDi Liu]

On Thu, Sep 4, 2008 at 12:11 AM,  <ronbutters at aol.com> wrote:
> However, CONSONANT CLUSTER is a well known term in linguistics. And FINAL CONSONANT CLUSTER SIMPLIFICATION is the usual term employed to name the rule that describes the phenomenon in English whereby a word-final consonant is variably deleted iff it is alike in voicing with the consonant that immediately precedes it (i.e., both must be either voiced or not voiced) .

You're saying that anytime you have this situation at the end of a word:

{unvoiced consonant} + {unvoiced consonant}

or

{voiced consonant} + {voiced consonant}

that the second consonant can be deleted?

So (according to your rule) for the word "wasp", you can just say
[was]?  And for "bulb", you can just say [b^l]?

I'm pretty sure I've never heard anybody in any English dialect say
either of those, or anything similar.  The final consonant cluster
reduction rule that I'm aware of only affects [t] and [d], and it
doesn't have much to do with voicing, but rather what kinds of
consonants are next to the [t] or [d] in question.  It's not simple
enough to make a one-sentence rule about; and the processes involved
form a "process continuum" that ranges from speaking in citation forms
to slurred and unintelligible speech.

--
Randy Alexander
Jilin City, China
My Manchu studies blog:
http://www.bjshengr.com/manchu

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