A Controversial Consonant
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8728189 |
|---|---|
| Authors | James B Mcmillan (0000-0001-9533-9688, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1977 |
| Volume | 52 |
| Issue | 1/2 |
| Pages | 84-84 |
| Publication date | 1977-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Speech (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0003-1283 • E-ISSN: 1527-2133 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/454722 |
| OpenAlex | W2333264481 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 4 |
T HE ENGLISH voiced alveolopalatal fricative transcribed I//, /3/, and /zh/, and spelled variously in words like azure, jabot, luxury, negligee, treasure, and Zhukov, has been troublesome to various people in various ways over many years. British and American speakers disagree on the use of the consonant in a number of words: Americans prefer / / in words like aphasia, anesthesia, and excursion, which in Britain have /zI/, /sI/, and /~/, and individuals in both speech communities disagree on whether l/~ or /J/ is the final consonant in such words as beige, corsage, garage, espionage, massage, mirage, and sabotage, and disagree on whether /il can begin a syllable in words like caesura, genre, luxuriant, protege, and regime. Quite different kinds of disagreement have afflicted professional students of English. For three centuries phoneticians and lexicographers have regularly shown lI/ as a constituent of such simple lexemes as casual, lesion, measure, occasion, and prestige and of such complex lexemes as Cartesian, composure, confusion, Ephesian, and glazier; but in the heyday of structural phonemics scholars disagreed on the English nativity of the consonant and on its phonological habitat, one even denying its status as an English phoneme. Before examining the disagreements, we may usefully recall the history of the consonant in English. Although /II was not a phoneme in Old English, a voiced palatal fricative did occur as the terminal element in the voiced affricate /j/ in such forms as brycg, ecg, licgan, mecgan in both final and medial prevocalic environments. This fricative phone was not the lineal ancestor of modern /i/, which originated in a different phonetic environment, but it was an embryo in the sense that the first English speakers who pronounced words like closure and conclusion with a li/ were not articulating a radically new speech sound; they were already accustomed to making a voiced palatal fricative phone. Modern English intervocalic /II obviously originated in the merging into a simple consonant of /z/ and /y/ in the sequence /zy/ from earlier IzI/. The /zy/ combination occurred in several types of Middle
Consonant · Linguistics · Lexicography and Language Studies · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Phonetics and Phonology Research · History · Philosophy
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |