Re: A question

Patrick Dunn wrote:

> My point is, I want to make a new English.  But I don't know what kind of
> sound changes are currently occuring in our language.  Does anyone know?
>
> My clumsy non-linguist ear hears a dropping of final /s/ and /z/, an
> ellision (is that the right word?) of dentals after nasels
Do you mean things like unstressed "can't"?  In my area, that's not so
much a loss of the dental, or even a change to a glottal stop, but rather
an unreleased dental stop.  The stop's burst isn't as apparent, so it sounds
like sound loss.  (There are dialects that *have* dropped final consonants
/ C_# ;  many Southern US dialects feature this.  But this has been around
for centuries: it's not a new thing.  If you want a good idea of what this is
like, read "A Confederacy of Dunces", by John Kennedy Toole, who
postumously won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980 or so for it.  It's uses mainly the
dialect from around New Orleans in its dialogues. It's pretty funny, too, so
you might enjoy it! :)  )

> , and a conversion of unstressed /u/ into /a/.
Could you give an example of that? Also, do you mean /@/ rather than /a/?
If this latter is the case, that too is a fairly common characteristic of many
English dialects, and may have been around longer than the Southern deletion
phenomenon above (probably has).

>  So "I don't want you to go to the
> park."  Might come out /ai don wan ja ta go ta da pak./
Around here, that'd be /ai dont] wVn tS@ t@ gou t@ D@ par=k/ .

I've noticed some dropping of nasal consonants word-finally around these
parts (such as:  /m&n/ [mE*~n] -> /m&~/ [mE*~].  That's a lower [E] there,
allophonicly.)

> Still, this isn't weird enough for 1000 years.
>
> What I want to know is, what general trends is english going through.  For
> instance, are vowels getting higher, fronter, backer, etceteraer?  Is it
> my imagination, or are /th/ and /dh/ going away
Yes, in some dialects it *is* disappearing.  Some time ago there was discussion
on this list about the recent change in British urban dialects of /T/ --> /f/ and
/D/ --> /v/, such that "both" becomes [b@uf] and "brother" becomes [brVv@]
in these dialects.  I'm not sure what kind of conditioning there might be;  does
anyone know if it doesn't occur word-initially?

But in the US, I have noticed no indication of such trends.  Such dialects
where this may have occurred in the past (notably the change in the dialect of lower
class New York speech to /t/ and /d/, respectively) seem to be being leveled out
due to education and other class influences (if you're *really* interested, I think
you can check William Labov, as I believe he has done some work on the New York
example [speaking of whom, you might want to abide by his comment that in English
it has historicly been the vowels that change, not the consonants]).

(I don't know of any other examples of this in the English speaking world,
so I can't comment on other countries)

One other phenomenon I think *will* come to completion is the loss of voiceless
/w_0/ as a phoneme in English, which used to characterize the difference between
"weather" and "whether".  I think all standard dialects (except perhaps the educated
speech of Scotland) have already done away with this, and in the US at least it survives
only in a few regional varieties, mostly rural ones.

I think the greater area of change will be in syntax and maybe morphology, rather
than phonology.

===========================================
Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
AIM: Deuterotom ICQ: 4315704
<http://www.angelfire.com/tx/eclectorium/>
"Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
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