Possible partial eggcorn: portcullis >> fort colours

[Damien Hall]

A three-year-old speaker of Southern English BrE of my acquaintaince
recently said

[fO:t k^l at z]

for 'portcullis'. Obviously, as he's still acquiring his language, we can't
be sure; but it seems like a pretty clear example of an eggcorn to me, at
least in the first syllable. As a speaker of Southern English BrE, he's
r-less, and the fiirst phoneme was certainly /f/, so it seems clear that
he's substituted the first syllable of the opaque _portcullis_ with a
phonetically-close one that has the appropriate semantic associations of a
castle (where portcullises are to be found), which could also be called a
_fort_.

The remainder of the word was less clear; it could even be that he was
pronouncing it correctly (since the last vowel is unstressed and, even
though it's /I/ in the target word, it may be that his idiolect reduces
that to schwa. In any case, I'd be reluctant to say that that too was an
eggcorn; 'colours' are also associated with knights, castles and things,
but I think that's too much of a stretch of association for a
three-year-old to make.

Damien

--
Damien Hall

University of York
Department of Language and Linguistic Science
Heslington
York YO10 5DD
UK

Tel. (office) 01904 432665
     (mobile) 0771 853 5634
Fax  01904 432673
http://www.york.ac.uk/res/aiseb/

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