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From: jerry.friedman99@gmail.com (jerryfriedman)
Newsgroups: alt.usage.english,sci.lang
Subject: Re: Somewheres
Date: Thu, 5 Sep 2024 14:28:01 +0000
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On Wed, 4 Sep 2024 17:54:04 +0000, Christian Weisgerber wrote:

> On 2024-09-02, jerryfriedman <jerry.friedman99@gmail.com> 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'.

Sorry, I wasn't clear.  I meant what happened to other
letters in French, notably <s>, <t>, and <z>.  In fact, what
happened to French <s> has a lot of parallels to what's
happening to English <r> in non-rhotic dialects.  The [r] is
lost, leaving a long vowel as you say, and then <r> is used to
write that vowel (still mostly non-standard, but there are
examples like "Burma" and "argo").  In the same way the
French [s] was lost, leaving long vowels, and then used
to write those vowels as in "resve". (Then it was removed
again and length was indicated by an accent mark.)

Of course there's a big difference, namely that lots of non-
rhotic speakers put an [r] in after those long vowels and
schwas even where there was originally no [r], and I don't
know of anything like that in French.

>>> 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.

Thanks.  I guess "lots" was an exaggeration.