John Maidment's Blog

From an article in a weekend newspaper: “a third of the women surveyed thought that their husbands were better cooks than they were”. That’s a nice ambiguous sentence, isn’t it? And it’s one that can be disambiguated in speech. But how?

From a cooking blog:

One of my favorite pasta dishes is tortelloni (the square ones, Romagna style) filled with Swiss chard and ricotta. My fondness for the dish was evident from the time I was a small boy and my grandmother made them for me while my parents were away. After polishing off a generous adult portion, I proceeded to collapse on the table, terrifying my grandmother who promptly called the doctor. After examining me, the doctor pronounced me “happy and asleep”.

For me the word street, like many other words beginning with the letters <str>, is pronounced with the cluster sṯɹ at the beginning. Over the years I have noticed more and more people pronouncing these words with the cluster ʃtʃɹ. I don’t know exactly how long this has been going on, but it seems to be quite a time. I have a relative who consistently uses this pronunciation and he turns 40 this year.

As far as I know, no-one has suggested a name for the process, so I would like to suggest STREET assimilation. I don’t know if anyone has done a serious study of the phenomenon. If not it seems like a worthwhile project to me.

STREET assimilation does not only affect words beginning <str>, but also those beginning <stj>, giving pronunciations like ʃtʃ(j)uːdnt and ʃtʃ(j)uːpɪd.

There are lots of things I don’t know about this feature. Here are some of them:

• Is it more common for male speakers than for females?
• Does it occur in one part of the UK more than others?
• Does it happen in other parts of the English-speaking world?
• Does it occur word-internally in words such as distress, and when followed by an unstressed vowel in words such as pastry ?
• Does it ever occur across word boundaries in phrases like this train or even missed you?

I think The Vowel Machine was the first JavaScript program I ever wrote. That was back in 1999. I managed to rescue it when my BTInternet webspace was closed down. I have spruced it up a bit and relaunched it.

You can find it here and there is also a link to it in the side-bar. I hope it is useful to some of you.

Thanks to Jack Windsor Lewis and Emilio Márquez SID has acquired a few more entries and will get a couple more soon. Also SID now has a quiz page. Test your knowledge of phonetic terminology. Win friends and influence people! Well, perhaps not.

I’ll be changing the questions from time to time, so check back occasionally.

As always, SID welcomes comments sent to sid AT blogjam DOT name. Please tell your colleagues and students about SID. He loves visitors. His link is in the side-bar.