Return of the minimal pairs

[Jim Rader]

Isn't <britches> for <breeches> standard English as the name for a
garment?  A pronunciation with [i] in "too big for his breeches"
would sound non-native to me....

Jim Rader

> I don't know anything about the phonology of Quechua, so I can only guess
> that these vacillations probably represent the misfit in sound-ranges
> between vowels in Quechua and Peruvian Spanish. What Varro noted was a
> different phenomenon involving closed syllables in native speech. I
> suspect what he meant by "vellam non villam" was that the "rustici" used
> an open [I] in closed tonic syllables where "urbani" and "suburbani" had a
> closed [i]. A parallel is provided by the American English rusticisms
> "britches" for <breeches> and "crick" for <creek>.

> DGK