To wonder why people put "r"s where they don't belong?

[somebloke123]

A trivial matter in the grand scheme of things of course but:

I first noticed this as a school boy "oop north" when a teacher from down south joined the staff and caused great hilarity by saying "drawrings" instead of "drawings".

It seems to be a southern phenomenon but not at all a type of chavspeak. Some of the worst offenders are media types who speak middle class "received" or "BBC" English.

It amounts to an inability to pronounce two successive vowel sounds without putting an "r" between.

A few examples I have heard in the radio, mainly over the past week or so:

West Brom managed a one-all drawragainst Aston Villa.

Planning the withdrawral from Afghanistan.

Chris Grayling is seeking a change in the lawron reasonable force against burglars.

The police are trying to restore Laura Norder.

And on Radio 4's "Poetry Please" in an otherwise moving reading of Oscar Wilde's "Ballad of Reading Jail":

"But I never sawraman who looked
So wistfully at the day.
I never sawraman who looked
With such a wistful eye."

Grrrrrrrrr!

I am very tempted to phone up my friends who I know are CofI MaryZed, and ask them 'what is the baked good that is often served with jam and cream?'

this tread is driving me into (odd) actions

Oh and how is water said if it's not 'war-ter' is it 'wat er' or 'wah-ter.'

Am I going to have to record myself again. I think I have bad ears...

I do, Maryeeeeeeezzzzzzzze

Scone rhymes with own and zone and moan.

It rhymes with awe, as in shock and awe, but you probably pronounce awe as oar, so that's no use .

It's sort of W-au-ter

Imagine Evelyn Waugh (or would you call him Evelyn War )

It definitely isn't War-ter.

And of course, the Irish have the soft t, which is half-way between your sharp t and a d sound as in thud. Just to add to the confusion.

My kids would say w-au-der.

The poor/pour/paw differences are down to whether your dialect kept the historic /r/ or not. If it didn't (i.e. most of southern England), the vowel quality in words that historically had an /r/ after the vowel is very susceptible to change. Knock yourselves out. I have a total merger between poor/pour/paw.

Southern British English started losing the /r/ in the mid 1400s, so I'm afraid it is a lost cause for those of you telling us to "speak proper".

And, she can't even pronounce my name properly [huffs]

But Phyllis, they seemed to lose it from poor, but gain it in words like pass

So they say paw and pars

I need a life

OK so Pascha say scone correctly. She is indeed right.

Argument over.

MyLastDuchessTue 09-Oct-12 11:35:08

It's called a 'bridging r'; it's not incorrect.

It's not a bridging R in the context being discussed.

A 'bridging r' is an 'r' on the end of one word which is follwoed by another word starting with a vowel.

So, you whereas you might pronounce winter as 'winta', when you say 'winter apple' you would pronounce the 'r' to kink the words together. So you'd say 'winta rapple'.

That's not incorrect, but adding an extra 'r' to 'drawing' is DEFINTELY wrong.

Poor/pour/paw all sound the same in my accent (Sussex). No 'r' at the end and they have the same vowel sound (could do with phonetic symbols on the iPad! It's the one that looks like a back-to-front c. Front of the mouth with rounded lips)

And pass is pars in my accent.

Yes, it's an intrusive rather than bridging r, I think.

We wish you a merry christmas...

Mary No, there's no gain of /r/ in 'pass'. It's just a long /a/ vowel. If you did an acoustic analysis of someone with a southern British English accent saying 'pass' you'd be able to see that there's only a vowel there - any kind of /r/ sound would show up on the graph.

People interpret it as an /r/ being present because they know that in that accent words like 'car' are pronounced with the same long /a/ vowel.

Don't say you need a life! This is what I do for a living!

Though she would probably say Chistmars [mutter].

See, see, see ^^ up there; see waterlego.

That's it, see - she takes the r out of poor and puts it into pass.

Why? Why?

Oooh, what exactly do you do Fairphyllis?

But Phyllis, there is an r in car, added on to the end of the long a sound. Pass should have the long a sound with an ss on the end, no r.

And my aunt (thinks she speaks very correctly) say parss the parcel and grarss and drauring (r, not w as I would say it).

No, Fair is right. It's a long 'a', (and the mouth is more closed than with a short 'a' like you'd get in 'cat') there's no actual r sound in it.

I want your job. I would love it, especially if I could tell everyone else they are WRONG.

I teach linguistics in a university. And do linguistics research.

I don't think anyone's accent is wrong, Mary

'Car' in southern British English is pronounced 'kaa'. No /r/ sound. Unless it's followed by a word beginning with a vowel and then you get the linking /r/.

Oh Fair. I am . Half my degree was Eng Lang and linguistics and I loved it. I wish I'd done that for the whole thing rather than teaming it with another subject. I particularly loved Phonetics and Phonology. We had a fantastic lecturer and I loved spending lessons listening to her nonsense words with clicks and implosives in them and transcribing them. Hours of fun!

Fair, Can you clear something up for me?

Tem pin bowling
Tem books
Hambag

I thought I was taught (in a Psycholinguistics module) that these were speech 'errors', specifically, errors of anticipation, IIRC. However, I've just read something on Wikipedia(!) that describes them as external 'sandhi' (which I'd never heard of). Which is correct? Or are they both?

But, but, but, someone has to be wrong waterlego. Just so I can be right

Phillis, the Ford Ka was met here with general hilarity for that reason.

I love all of this

Disclaimer: I'm not a phonologist or phonetician. But sandhi is the term used to describe phonological processes that happen at word or morpheme boundaries (the word 'sandhi' is borrowed from Sanskrit grammarians who talked about this phenomenon). So, yes, 'tem pin bowling' and the bridging /r/ and intrusive /r/ are all cases of sandhi. I'd be uncomfortable calling these 'speech errors' because they are part of the grammar of particular languages or dialects: I think of speech errors as being things like sound metathesis or selecting the wrong word.

I would call them 'anticipatory assimilation' - it's really the 'anticipatory' bit that is most important because it provides evidence that we 'plan ahead' by altering sound segments on the basis of what's going to come after them.

Mary Ah, yes, the dialectal imperialism of the Ford Ka. They need to employ some linguists - actually, they might do - companies that do branding and product naming for clients often employ linguists to check that product names work in different languages and so on. There was a great article in The Times, I think (the British one), about a company that does this - they named the Blackberry and Febreze.

TCD has a good linguistics department and up north, so does the University of Ulster.

That planning ahead would explain the hang sangwidges pronunciation of people who can say ham perfectly well on its own.

This is a great thread, thanks everyone, I'm really enjoying it.