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Okay, n00b question time.

Reading about English phonology at Wikipedia, I came across a brief discussion of the phenomenon of "yod-dropping". I don't understand where the /j/ comes from to be dropped. When I pronounce 'cute', I habitually say it k-yoo-t; when I say 'union', it's yoon-yun. And of course the name of the letter U is yu. I know from experience that 'u' can mean either oo or yoo, depending on context. I've never given it any thought before; now that I have, I'm completely perplexed.

Why is the palatal aspect of the sound so integral that its omission is considered sufficiently noteworthy to have its own formal term? Why is it there in the first place?

Melend wrote: Why is the palatal aspect of the sound so integral that its omission is considered sufficiently noteworthy to have its own formal term?

Most sufficiently widespread sound changes in English have names.

Why is it there in the first place?

<u> in Middle English did not represent /u:/. The symbol for that sound was <ou>. Instead <u>, when long, represented /y:/, which was only found in loanwords. The French are to blame; though in that language, it makes sense because etymology. The modern English reflex of /y:/ is /ju:/, via the diphthong /iu/ (see: dew-duke merger).

Vuvuzela wrote:Most sufficiently widespread sound changes in English have names.

Well, yeah... but I didn't grok why the presence of a /j/ wasn't named instead of its absence.

<u> in Middle English did not represent /u:/. The symbol for that sound was <ou>. Instead <u>, when long, represented /y:/, which was only found in loanwords. The French are to blame; though in that language, it makes sense because etymology. The modern English reflex of /y:/ is /ju:/, via the diphthong /iu/ (see: dew-duke merger).

Ah, that clarifies matters greatly. Also, the French can be blamed for practically everything! This is a wonderful discovery. Is there any reason why 'yu' should be a more common sound than 'oo'?

The reason is historical. But it also covers a variety of different words and it is more common not to have it than to have it. Yod dropping in words like new or tune is very common, but in words like cute or union it is not. Some rural areas of England have in beautiful.

There's also yod coalescence, which is when another sound change happens to the cluster like tj > tS.

There's also yod coalescence, which is when another sound change happens to the cluster like tj > tS.

Thus, the places with yod-coalescence have "dew, tune, tube" sound like "jew, "chune", chube", while the places with yod-dropping sound like "do, toon, toob".

Terra wrote:Thus, the places with yod-coalescence have "dew, tune, tube" sound like "jew, "chune", chube", while the places with yod-dropping sound like "do, toon, toob".

The British synthpop band Ultravox has a song with the line "like empty tuneless harmonies" which I, with my yoddroppy dialect, for years heard as "like empty Jewish harmonies".

I was always taught that /y:/ merged with /i:/, as in "bry:d" > "bride," and that the /iu/ and /eu/ clusters had a separate origin. Is that not right?

i think that old english's y: became i: but what we're talking about is y: that entered into middle english from french and was probably adapted there and then.

(Iirc, /y/ did deround in some English dialects but not in others, leading to a few couplets in later english where words come from different dialects. Couldn't cite you any, though, and I may have misrecalled)

Salmoneus wrote:(Iirc, /y/ did deround in some English dialects but not in others, leading to a few couplets in later english where words come from different dialects. Couldn't cite you any, though, and I may have misrecalled)

All I can think of is bury, where the standard spelling comes from one dialect and the normative pronunciation from another.

linguoboy wrote:

Salmoneus wrote:(Iirc, /y/ did deround in some English dialects but not in others, leading to a few couplets in later english where words come from different dialects. Couldn't cite you any, though, and I may have misrecalled)

All I can think of is bury, where the standard spelling comes from one dialect and the normative pronunciation from another.

"Busy" (and its derivatives, of course). Exactly the same story.

Hydroeccentricity wrote:I was always taught that /y:/ merged with /i:/, as in "bry:d" > "bride," and that the /iu/ and /eu/ clusters had a separate origin. Is that not right?

it is. before the merger, there was some confusion between /y/ -- or at least /y:/, not sure if the short version did this -- and something written <ie>, which is generally considered some sort of diphthong /iy/ but my completely uneducated guess is that it was /1/.