Thursday 6 July 2017

intrusive r

Recently I learnt that the phonological phenomenon that I tend to partake of—inserting some errant phoneme into a word, both in English and in German, of course has a name: epenthesis (Epenthese).
The subtle p sound that’s rather unavoidable in hampster, somepthing or warmpth is one example called excrescence when a consonant is stuck in there, but the most common form in the received regionalism comes in the form of adding a rhotic sound—as in idear, warsh or what I’ve been called out for, Chicargo. There can also be something called a linking-r as in drawering or as in “I saw-r a film today—oh boy!” Four-thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire—or one twenty-sixth of a pothole per person, which through some formula (or not) yields the seating capacity of the Royal Albert Hall.