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From: Christian Weisgerber <naddy@mips.inka.de>
Newsgroups: alt.usage.english,sci.lang
Subject: Re: Somewheres
Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2024 17:54:04 -0000 (UTC)
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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'.

>> 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