Re: [ADS-L] A nice Southernism . . .

[RonButters at AOL.COM]

BULB is an exception, as is HERB; /l/ and /r/ are vocoids and do not 
participate in the CCS rule. Note that for many speakers there would be no /r/ in 
HERB, and /l/ becomes something like a /w/.

You are simply wrong about WASP. Th loss of final /p/ in WASP, CLASP, etc. is 
so well documented that even if you have never heard it, if you have every 
read any elementary scholarly work on American sociolinguistic variability, it 
is there (see, e.g., Fromkin and Rodman 1998: 413). The /l/-and-/r/ exception 
is usually mentioned as well.

In a message dated 9/3/08 11:17:04 PM, strangeguitars at GMAIL.COM writes:


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




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