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!

But in my accent, oar doesn't have a spoken 'r'?!

It sounds like awww. Same as the end of paw. So how can you make paw and oar sound different when you don't say the 'r' at the end of oar?!

Waterlego, a friend of mine works on a language which has 20 different clicks! She can do most of them as well. I can't tell the difference between half of them.

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Scone absolutely positively MUST rhyme with cone, not bloody gone. Has the world gorn mad?!

This used to confuse me as a child in Ireland when we would get joke books that were from England and there would be puns that involved a bridging 'r' e.g. the 'Laura Norder / law and order' in the OP's post. I never got these jokes because they don't make sense unless you speak with that accent.

Well [helpful], you could try pronouncing oar like, erm oar

Like Pascha, poor/paw/pour/pore all sound like pawwwww.

But oar to me doesn't have an 'r' when you speak it. Neither does car, bar, far, planter, or just about anything else that ends in 'r'.

Car = caaaa
Bar = baaaa
Far = faaaaa
Planter = plantaaaaa

It's just how it is here!

Well, that explains it [sympathetic], you obviously can't talk properly.

Fair Thank you, you are creaking my rusty linguistics brain into gear for me :)

I was mistaken about speech errors. An example of an anticipation error would be 'leading list' for 'reading list', so they are genuine errors, albeit inevitable in spontaneous speech.

The 'hambag' example was, as you say, explained to me as assimilation, which makes more sense (and that would have been in a phonology lecture rather than psycholinguistics, I guess) In all of those examples above, there are alveolars followed by bilabials so the nasal alveolar assimilates to the bilabial nasal.

[baffled]

Fair I think I can do 4 or 5 clicks at most. I would struggle to identify the differences between 20! It was the implosives that alarmed me the most. They're so...visceral, for want of a better description.

Oh here, there's no r in car. You trying to send me over the edge.

here's another that divides - Shrewsbury.

also Australia

I say both those places correctly btw

Italics fail.

I have noticed an increase in pronunciation of Europe as 'Yorop', which I'm not keen on the sound of.

I hate added rs - and I ahve to put up with using my middle name as mum didn;t want one to appear - the name she wanted to call me ends with a vowel sound and the spare starts with one. SHe was so scared of a stray r creeping in that she put them the other way round (not my names, but imagine Joanna Eleanor - she thought people would say JoannaREleanor so called me Eleanor Joanna to avoid it, but still kept Joanna as my given name, IYSWIM). EVen so, they are worse in singing than in speech, and I absolutely hate IYam instead of I am in songs.
Not sure any of that makes any sense.

Isn't Shrewsbury one of those ridiculous English pronunciations?

Sh-rows-bu-ry, perhaps.

Australia is Australia

Au-strale-ee-uh, surely?

Do they have translators at mumnset meetups?

I love you MaryZed. Most of Your pronunciation is Correct.

I have been whispering 'sexshooal' to my laptop and my DD is looking at me like this

What I'd like to know is how on earth do English children learn to spell correctly if they don't pronounce half the letters and add extra ones all over the place?

And how on earth can pull and pool not sound exactly the same?

Ooh cardibach I worked beside someone I thought for ages was called Eleanor.

Turns out her name was Helena. It was in the east midlands.

It does actually, cardi.

My brother has a name ending in the same letter as our surname. And if you took that letter of the surname it was another surname, and every time he gave his name as a child they would get his surname wrong.

Is Europe your-up, with a short uh and a little more stress on the first syllable?

Shrewsbury is Shrews (like the animal) though people (who are wrong) say Shrows bury

I've heard Australia Ors-tralia. True story.

Ooo ooo MaryZed how do you say Audi? Most Irish people say it wrong, I've told DH we'll never get one (as if we could anyway!) until he learns to say it right

Euphemia - yes there are dialects which distinguish between 'oar' and 'or'. It's a difference in the vowel - 'oar' is pronounced with the tongue higher in the mouth than for 'or', or as a diphthong, which is a gliding sort of sound. It's quite hard to do if you have the merger. But again it's partly to do with whether your dialect retains historic /r/ or not.

A lot of English accents have this merger - it's called the horse-hoarse merger. Conservative RP has the distinction though - if you were to listen to an old recording of the Queen, you'd probably be able to hear it.

Shrewsbury I would say as Shro-z-bree.

Australia I would say as oss-tray-lee-uh.

Is it any wonder lots of people not me though from Essex frequently have problems with learning to spell correctly?

Actually, on reflection, Australia is slightly more like oss-dray-lee-uh.

I might be wrong (unlikely of course [arf]) but I would say ow-dee, more or less. Maybe a tad extra w sound.

My aunt (the "proper" one who say parss the parcel) of course is the one who insists on Shrowsbury . I will take great pleasure in correct ing her.

Thank you Minnie . I hate to correct you after your lovely complement, but pool has an oooooooo sound in the middle, pull has an uh sound. So p-oooo-l and p-uh-l, very different. Do you say c-ooooo-k and b-ooooo-k as well?