Re: Something interesting about West Coast American English
Posted: Fri Dec 29, 2017 4:17 pm
Me but I'm weird. I also pronounce [lˠ] in half/calfzompist wrote:Who pronounces the l in talk/walk/stalk (in American English)?
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Me but I'm weird. I also pronounce [lˠ] in half/calfzompist wrote:Who pronounces the l in talk/walk/stalk (in American English)?
I don't. Apart from that, I'm still the same as you.garysk wrote:Oh, and I forgot palm/balm/psalm/calm: I do pronounce the /l/ in those words
I might insert an /l/ there because it's an uncommon word to hear in conversation and overpronouncing it would aid comprehension, but it's not there in my spontaneous pronunciation.KathTheDragon wrote:Brit here, and I don't believe I have ever heard the l pronounced in any of these words, except maybe "balm"
At least in my idiolect, practically all the <alm> words are spelling-pronounced as /ɔlm/ (which of course has been vocalized again to [ɒo̯m]). Middle-aged people (e.g. my parents) and older seem to be more likely to have non-spelling-pronounced pronunciations of these words, whereas, say, my daughter has /ɔlm/ in almond, and I am pretty sure she did not learn the word from reading herself.linguoboy wrote:I might insert an /l/ there because it's an uncommon word to hear in conversation and overpronouncing it would aid comprehension, but it's not there in my spontaneous pronunciation.KathTheDragon wrote:Brit here, and I don't believe I have ever heard the l pronounced in any of these words, except maybe "balm"
I hear some people insert /l/ in almond nowadays and it always sounds a bit jarring to me, like almonds are something they learned about from reading and didn't grow up buying or eating.
You do pronounce the l in valve, though, right? (Just making sure. He did mention that earlier).KathTheDragon wrote:Brit here, and I don't believe I have ever heard the l pronounced in any of these words, except maybe "balm"
Yeah, but the vowel is completely different - /vælv/ vs. /pɑːm/Vijay wrote:You do pronounce the l in valve, though, right? (Just making sure. He did mention that earlier).KathTheDragon wrote:Brit here, and I don't believe I have ever heard the l pronounced in any of these words, except maybe "balm"
Same, although I do specifically remember two people pronouncing the first vowel in almond as /æ/.KathTheDragon wrote:Yeah, but the vowel is completely different - /vælv/ vs. /pɑːm/Vijay wrote:You do pronounce the l in valve, though, right? (Just making sure. He did mention that earlier).KathTheDragon wrote:Brit here, and I don't believe I have ever heard the l pronounced in any of these words, except maybe "balm"
Same, except in palm, but for me they're /alm/ (also not cot/caught merged). I also have an /l/ in folk, but only for the music genre.zompist wrote:Who pronounces the l in talk/walk/stalk (in American English)? The AHD has them all as /ɔk/, which is how I say them. I don't have the cot/caught merger, so I don't merge cock /kak/ and caulk /kɔk/.garysk wrote:in my variety of American English, I have father/bother/cot/caught all with the same vowel, and talk/walk/stalk are pronounced with the same /a/ as father (tock/wok/stock), with no remnants of the /l/ present in the spelling. My father was horrified to learn that I did not pronounce the /l/ in talk/walk/stalk.
Likewise, putting an l in half/calf would seem odd to me, and the dictionary agrees.
But I'm with you on the -alm words— for me they're /ɔlm/, at least emphasized. In rapid speech they might well be /ɔm/.
I've only heard one person NOT pronounce the /l/ in almond in the States, and he's from California. Course, he pronounced it /æmənd/, which just made the difference stand out even more.linguoboy wrote:I might insert an /l/ there because it's an uncommon word to hear in conversation and overpronouncing it would aid comprehension, but it's not there in my spontaneous pronunciation.KathTheDragon wrote:Brit here, and I don't believe I have ever heard the l pronounced in any of these words, except maybe "balm"
I hear some people insert /l/ in almond nowadays and it always sounds a bit jarring to me, like almonds are something they learned about from reading and didn't grow up buying or eating.
Yeah. I don't pronounce a /l/ in "calm", "psalm", "balm" and "palm", but I do have /l/ in "almond". It seems common for Americans to have /l/ in "almond" even if they don't use in words like "calm" and "palm".vergil wrote:I've only heard one person NOT pronounce the /l/ in almond in the States, and he's from California. Course, he pronounced it /æmənd/, which just made the difference stand out even more.linguoboy wrote:I might insert an /l/ there because it's an uncommon word to hear in conversation and overpronouncing it would aid comprehension, but it's not there in my spontaneous pronunciation.KathTheDragon wrote:Brit here, and I don't believe I have ever heard the l pronounced in any of these words, except maybe "balm"
I hear some people insert /l/ in almond nowadays and it always sounds a bit jarring to me, like almonds are something they learned about from reading and didn't grow up buying or eating.
The word "falcon" was once pronounced "fawkin" then the /l/ got restored by spelling pronunciation.Sumelic wrote:As far as I know, the historical development in standard English is as follows:
I assume "calve" and "halve" are mainly patterned after "calf" and "half".
- /l/ lost in -alk words resulting in /ɔːk/, which makes sense if we assume it was some kind of vocalization of /l/ to [w] in this context that occured before the change of [au] (=[aw]) to /ɔː/. (I don't know if we actually have evidence indicating that this is exactly how this change occurred.)
- /l/ lost in -alm words resulting in, for some reason, /ɑːm/. Maybe it's related to the historical variation in BrEng between /ɑː/, /ɔː/, /æ/ and /eɪ/ before nasals in words from French, like aunt, haunt, grand and chamber. I don't know how old /ɔm/ pronunciations are in American English; I suspect that they mostly represent a development that's more recent than the BrEng/AmEng split, but I could be wrong about that. With regard to non-final -lm-, "salmon", which comes from French, seems to be a case of early l-reintroduction like "fault" etc, but I don't know the details, and "almond" likewise seems to have been variable in French.
- /l/ lost in "calf", "half", leading to /ɑː/ in (most varieties of?) BrEng but /æ/ in AmEng. This seems related to the trap-bath split, but it's unclear to me in what way: it could be that the pronunciation with /æ/ is older and this was broadened in BrEng because of the phonetic context, or it could be that the pronunciation with /ɑ/ is older and this was shortened to /æ/ in AmEng because of the rarity of the sequence /ɑf/ in other words, and the association of the sequence /ɑf/ with bath-type pronunciations. Maybe compare "laugh" where as far as I know the development was along the lines of /laux/ > [lauxʷ] > [laxʷ] > [laf], with subsequent /af/ > /ɑːf/ in BrEng (in contrast, "cough" has a short vowel in BrEng but /ɔ/ in non-cot-caught-merged AmEng).
The common modern American English /ɑlm/, /ɔlm/ pronunciations are I'm pretty sure due to re-introduction of /l/ and possible coloring by it. Maybe /l/ was actually retained all along in some American English accents, but that seems a bit unlikely to me unless anyone knows of some evidence of this.
I don't think there is anything historical that sets "psalm" apart from "palm" etc. Influence from "psalter" may have made reintroduction of /l/ in "psalm" more probable than in other words. John Walker IIRC argues for using /ælm/ in words derived from "-alm" words like palmistry, palmate, calmative (I don't remember if these are the exact examples he gives). This doesn't require the synchronic presence of /l/ in the original word any more than the use of /mn/ in words like hymnal, damnation implies that /mn/ is present in "hymn" and "damn".