Re: USAGE: writ [was Re: Here, *Here*, and There, *There*]

On Sunday, June 30, 2002, at 11:13 , Thomas R. Wier wrote:

> Quoting agricola <agricola@...>:
>
>> yscreus il Th. Weir:
>
> It's <Wier>.
>
>>> Quoting agricola <agricola@...>:
>>>
>>>> Also, it'd be pronounced /wrItiN/. :)
>>
>>> What? In all my experience, a <writ> (as in "of habeas corpus") has
>>> always been [rIt]; the onset cluster [wr] is complete disallowed for
>>> me, not surprisingly, since it flagrantly violates sonority contour
>>> principles.
>>
>> Different strokes for different blokes. Are you one of those [hw]less
>> people, too?
>
> No, I do have [w_0].
Yes, [w_0] is not obsolete either side of the Atlantic.  It's still common
enough
in Scotland, where I've even encountered [hw] and, I believe, some northern
dialects.  I still heard it occasionally used in these southern climes
when I was
a youngster and one still encounters it in the heart of RP-dom in certain
styles
(e.g. reading in church).

> Don't get me wrong:  I'm not condemning your usage,
No, indeed - it would be nice to learn that old pronunciations still
survive
somewhere.  I believe initial /kn/ persisted in odd places till the 19th
cent.,
but I suspect it's obsolete everywhere now.

> but I'm rather shocked because I was under the impression that the onset
> cluster [wr] had died out in just about every English dialect... oh,
> over 800 years ago.
Indeed so - I had hitherto been under the impression that it had virtually
disappeared during the Middle English period.

>> Wot's a "sonority contour principle"? And how does it apply in this
>> case?
>
> All sounds can be arranged along a "sonority hierarchy" according
> to how loud they are relative to other sounds with the same length,
> stress and pitch.  This hierarchy is usually represented schematically
> something like this:
>
> MORE SONORITY
>   vowels
>   glides/semivowels
>   liquids
>   nasals
>   stops
>     - voiced
>     - voiceless
> LESS SONORITY
>
> (In fact, voicelessness is always less sonorous than voicedness.)
[snip]

> [kr] and [ny] are licit onset clusters, but *[pt], *[pn] and
> *[nl] are not.
Nor indeed is [kn] any more   :=(

> In the case of [wr], there is no distance at
> all (although historically <r> was a trill),
Yep, I find it well nigh impossible to pronounce [w] and the modern
AngloAmerican [r\] together.   As you say, initial /r/ was once trilled, as
the Welsh /r/ still is.   In the Welsh initial {wr} both sounds are said
more or less together: the lips are rounded to produce [w], and the
tongue tip is trilled to pronounce [r].

> which is why I'm surprised that you would have it.
Me too.  What sort of /r/ do you use?

Ray.

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