#non-rhotic

[watching-the-apocalypse]

important linguistics question of the day

we are doing no nuance november

when saying the word arm..

R is present (North America)

R is NOT present (North America)

R is present (British Isles)

R is NOT present (British Isles)

R is present (International)

R is NOT present (international)

Voting ended onNov 18, 2024

ps in this poll I myself count as international, am just investigating the two most well studied Englishes :)

[llevs-corner]

Non-rhotic accents include most varieties of British English, Welsh English, New Zealand English, Australian English, South African English, Trinidadian and Tobagonian English, Standard Malaysian English and Singaporean English.

In non-rhotic varieties, speakers no longer pronounce /r/ in postvocalic environments—that is, when it is immediately after a vowel and not followed by another vowel. For example, in isolation, a rhotic English speaker pronounces the words hard and butter as /ˈhɑːrd/ and /ˈbʌtər/, whereas a non-rhotic speaker "drops" or "deletes" the /r/ sound, pronouncing them as /ˈhɑːd/ and /ˈbʌtə/. When an r is at the end of a word but the next word begins with a vowel, as in the phrase "better apples", most non-rhotic speakers will pronounce the /r/ in that position (the linking R), since it is followed by a vowel in this case.

[gwydionmisha]

British accents of the past! Would Draco Malfoy's dad have sounded like that in The Patriot? Would Ichabod Crane? Gretchen McCulloch will tell us.

[marigolds-sorry]

I can't believe how super-conscious of my accent I am now.

I was only in Delaware for 4 months, but the Philly/tri-state accent is pretty different from the Boston/Eastern Massachusetts accents I've grown up with. 

I didn't even realize that I had an accent until I went down to Delaware for college. Like a lot of people my age who live in New England, I didn't pick up the non-rhotic (R-dropping) Boston accent. So I just assumed that I didn't have one. 

WRONG. I do have a distinctively Massachusetts way of speaking: fast, without much enunciation, and with a weird sort of slackness of the jaw that I can't really explain or describe. I use "wicked" as an adverb. I say "rotary" instead of "roundabout" or "traffic circle". I say "rum" instead of "room", "hut" or "haht" instead of "hot", and "chahder", "pahder", and "ahtta" instead of "chowder", "powder", or "out of (outta)". Even my R's, which I definitely pronounce, seem to be a bit of an afterthought, without much emphasis. 

The only reason I'm talking about this is because I'm going back to Delaware in a couple of days, and the hyper-awareness of my own accent is suddenly going to spring up again because of its contrast to everyone else's. It'll be interesting. 

I hope I haven't bored you all to death.

[snowgall]

Rhoticity and eggcorns: Sort vs. Sought

I recently binge-read a bunch of Star Trek fanfic written by Valyria (aka sassary-quinto), especially her excellent Spock/Uhura fic Winds Against A Star. Because I read so much of her writing in a short time, I noticed a peculiar quirk of this author: her consistent use of the word "sort" in cases where I am reasonably sure the appropriate word choice would be "sought"

Note: this is in no way meant to be a grammar-nazi type of post. I'm a linguist, so I'm not the least bit interested in playing grammar-gotcha games. I'm just really interested in how and why a misspelling of this type would crop up.

"She had not [...] assumed it was her personal knowledge he sort, but rather access to whatever research or materials she had used to study."

"Nyota frowned, [...] 'You are aware sir that Vulcans have a reputation for being…' she sort a nice way to phrase it, '…cold? Emotionless?'"

"Instinctively he sort out Nyota."

"It is known that T'Pau sort a Vulcan wife for him."

In each of these cases, I was thrown a bit from my reading, wondering what the author meant. If this mistake had just shown up one time, I would have put it down to a typo or cut & paste error or the like. But cropping up so consistently made me wonder what could be the source of confusion. Since I'm a speaker of American English, it did not immediately occur to me that "sort" could ever be a homophone for "sought", which as it turns out, is the most likely explanation.

My dialect of American English is what is called "rhotic", which for purposes of this blog post means that words written with an "r" following a vowel are generally pronounced with an "r" sound. So I can never look at the word "sort" and imagine it sounding like the word "sought". However speakers of so-called "non-rhotic" dialects (often British or Australian) will see an "r" following a vowel but interpret it as essentially "silent". So for a British English speaker, confusing the spellings of "sought" and "sort" makes a whole lot more sense.

Indeed, the word sort has more than one meaning in English. One of the meanings of sort is "type" or "kind", which I can't imagine being a source of confusion here, but another meaning is to "sort out" a problem, similar to how one might "seek out" a solution. (n.b. the past tense of "seek" is the irregular and uncommon "sought"). In this case, the meaning has just enough of an overlap that I think the sort/sought confusion might be an example of an "eggcorn". According to Wikipedia:

"[...] an eggcorn is an idiosyncratic substitution of a word or phrase for a word or words that sound similar or identical in the speaker's dialect [...] The new phrase introduces a meaning that is different from the original, but plausible in the same context"

I should point out that this author frequently used "sort" in the commonly accepted ways, meaning either "type of" or to "fix a problem". It was only in the specific examples given above that it was a misspelling of "sought".

And I should also add that none of this should be taken as a criticism of Valyria's writing as a whole, which I very much enjoyed or else I wouldn't have read so much of it!