Path: ...!news.mixmin.net!weretis.net!feeder8.news.weretis.net!news.szaf.org!inka.de!mips.inka.de!.POSTED.localhost!not-for-mail From: Christian Weisgerber Newsgroups: alt.usage.english,sci.lang Subject: Re: Somewheres Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2024 17:54:04 -0000 (UTC) Message-ID: References: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Injection-Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2024 17:54:04 -0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: lorvorc.mips.inka.de; posting-host="localhost:::1"; logging-data="34234"; mail-complaints-to="usenet@mips.inka.de" User-Agent: slrn/1.0.3 (FreeBSD) Bytes: 2906 Lines: 36 On 2024-09-02, jerryfriedman wrote: > More recently, lots of final /r/s have been lost in some dialects > of English, except before a vowel in the next word-- That is a more general change. I took Peter's question to be about word-final consonants. Also, it's not a straight loss. Take "weird". That is [wɪəd] in conservative Received Pronunciation. The r isn't lost, it is vocalized. There is a secondary change where the resulting diphthong is smoothed, giving [wɪːd], which, if isn't considered RP yet, will be soon. Equivalent changes are documented for [ɛə] > [ɛː] and [ɔə] > [ɔː], which raises the question whether this didn't happen for all vowels, e.g. "hard" [hɑrd] > ?[hɑəd] > [hɑːd]. Compare r vocalization in German and Danish. > a similar pattern to what happened in French, To me it doesn't look at all similar to the historic partial loss of French final r, e.g. in the -er infinitives, nor the sometime deletion of final [r] and [l] after obstruents, e.g. chambre > chamb', table > tab'. >> Strikingly, Middle English lost final -e and, inconsistenly, -en, >> which is intimately tied to the collapse of the declension system. > > And lots of the conjugation system? Yes, I guess I meant to write "inflection" there. I don't think the conjugation system shows any additional losses, though. If you strike -e and -en from Middle English conjugation, you end up with the system familiar from the King James Version: 2. singular -st, 3. singular present -th, nothing else. The 2SG ending was lost along with its pronoun. The 3SG change -th > -s is poorly understood, but didn't add or remove any ending. -- Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.inka.de