pronunciation - Why is "str" sometimes pronounced as "shtr"?





Pronunciation of voiceless alveolar fricative /s/ as ʃ (/sh/) in slang?



My understanding was that the cluster "str", for example in "stress", is usually pronounced /stɹɛs/, just like Wiktionary mentions. Their audio sample confirms this.


However, I sometimes hear a different kind of pronunciation, namely "shtress" or something like /ʃtɹɛs/ (forgive my IPA knowledge).


As an example, Jay Z is rapping about the "New York city shtreets" (here at ~ 0:30), not "streets". The actors from the Jersey Shore seem to do it as well, so I'm starting to believe this is an East Coast / New York thing?


So, regarding this oddity:



  • Where in the English world do people speak like this? Is this even localized to a certain area?

  • Is this a recent development? I didn't hear about this back when I was learning English at school.

  • More formally, is this a "mistake"?


My naive explanation would be that it's simply a natural development because the "sh" forms automatically when you pull back your tongue from forming an "s" to "r".



Answer



After digging for a while, I found the answer in a paper called Assimilation at a Distance by Wayne P. Lawrence.1 It's a little dated (2000), but also cites studies from 1993 and earlier describing this phenomenon.



The recent history of American English includes a sound change that seems to have gone unattested in the scholarly literature.1 This is the change of /s/ to /ʃ/ before /tr/ (i.e., a PHONEMIC CHANGE), which involves a palatalization of the initial sound in the cluster /str/, typically in initial position but not exclusively.



The author further mentions that "this phonemic change seems to be neither dialectal nor regional." However, it's definitely an American English peculiarity. It seems that it was first heard on television or radio broadcasts and became popular over these channels. Of course, the internet helps spreading such a linguistic "oddity" – and even I know I picked it up from television shows and continue to (subconciously) use this pronunciation.


Regarding the phonetic principles behind this change, Lawrence summarizes:



More concretely, this pronunciation is an implicit "assertion" on their part that in their grammar /r/, being [+ interrupted], is marked with respect to the opposition INTERRUPTED versus CONTINUOUS - exactly the same way that [ʃ], being [+ compact], is marked with respect to the opposition COMPACT versus DIFFUSE. The marked character of /r/ is prompted and confirmed phonetically, of course, by its high degree of retroflection in American English.7



This would explain the fact that we only hear this in American English. What's interesting is that the same does not appear to happen to "spr", which can be explained by the phonetic differences in "t" and "p":



I would surmise, therefore, that /str/ lends itself to realization as [ʃtr] while /spr/ remains unaltered also due to the phonological value of /t/ and /p/.



Another more recent paper was written by David Durian.2 It goes into the details of social background and "shtr" as well as providing some more explanations for its development.


1 – Lawrence, Wayne P. (2000) "Assimilation at a Distance," American Speech Vol. 75: Iss. 1: 82-87; doi:10.1215/00031283-75-1-82
2 – Durian, David (2007) "Getting [ʃ]tronger Every Day?: More on Urbanization and the Socio-geographic Diffusion of (str) in Columbus, OH," University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: Vol. 13: Iss. 2, Article 6


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

etymology - Origin of "s--t eating grin"

What is the origin of the phrase shit eating grin ? How did it come to mean showing smugness or self-satisfaction of an individual's actions? Answer From the Urban Dictionary: ...these uses are documented in the Oxford English Dictionary no earlier than 1957 There have been similar expressions used quite far back: In Book XXI of his History of Rome, Livy describes a Carthaginian sect of coprophages, the risus faecivorus, or shit-eating grin, being commonly displayed by its adherents. Although, its origin is undetermined, they may have been incidents which caused the invention of this phrase. Below is an excerpt: "1944 Jrnl. Nerv. & Mental Dis. XCIX. 959 Among demented patients in advanced stages of their illness,..it is not rare to see some of them grasp their own feces, chew them and eat them often with great pleasure and satisfaction (coprophagia).
Read more

usage - "there doesn't seem" vs. "there don't seem"

As an example, consider the two sentences: There don't seem to be any doctors here. and There doesn't seem to be any doctors here. To my ear, the first sounds great, and the second is painfully awkward. So which is correct, grammatically? I've found lots of disagreement on this around the Web, with various sources citing different ways of treating the word "any" (as singular, always, or as either depending on to what it refers). No consensus, however, could I locate. Answer The relevant article in ‘The Cambridge Guide to English Usage’ says: Existential there couples with either singular or plural verbs ( there is / there are , according to the following noun phrase) . . . This formal agreement is strictly maintained in academic writing. But in narrative and everyday writing, there is and especially there’s is found even with plural nouns. The same consideration applies to There don’t and There doesn’t . What it means for your examples is that it all depends ...
Read more

First floor vs ground floor, usage origin

Ground floor – First floor: In British English, the floor of a building which is level with the ground is called the ground floor. The floor above it is called the first floor, the floor above that is the second floor, and so on. In American English, the floor which is level with the ground is called the first floor, the floor above it is the second floor, and so on. (Collins COBUILD English Usage) Though there are exceptions to the above-mentioned usage,( and exceptions are not the issue here) in public buildings in the U.S., for instance, it’s also possible to call the street-level floor the ground floor, like in Britain, but how come that in the UK and Europe the ground level floor and the first floor are respectively referred to as the first floor and the second floor in the U.S. (and so on for higher floors) . Was it a custom imported into the U.S. from a different culture? Related: "Ground floor" vs. "first floor" .
Read more

meaning - What is synonyme of "scale"?

What is the meaning of the word "scale" in both cases? http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/scale I couldn't find the appropriate meaning in the dictionary. “For any new table reservations product, no matter how good it is, it’s very hard to get businesses to adopt the product at scale for two reasons. First, it is hard to scale a sales team without massive funding. Answer The word scale can have many meanings and can act as both noun and verb. Source 1 In your case, for understanding the meaning of at scale in the first sentence, see this thread . In the second sentence, it is being used as a phrasal verb ( Source 2 ) and in this context, it means to increase the size of the sales team .
Read more

etymology - Since when has "a hot minute" meant a long time?

The term a hot minute can be found all over blogs and in casual speech, meaning essentially, "a long time." The term is mostly slang, but seems to have become popular enough to appear on sites as reputable as PBS.org. Delia pretends to be mad about it for a hot minute but gets over it pretty quickly because the love of her life is finally home. I can't find it defined in reputable dictionaries, but The New York Times confirms the meaning in this article about slang uses of the word "hot." Hottie is still bandied about on campus by not-quite-with-it seniors, and a hot minute is defined as “a long time.” There is life left in the cleaned-up meaning of hot mess, which has come to mean “disheveled” or “incompetent,” as in “I was a hot mess this morning before I hit the shower.” The term reminds me of "A New York Minute," which means the exact opposite, "a very short time." So what is the origin of the term "a hot minute," and how lo...
Read more

meaning - "Instable" or "unstable"?

From my experience, it seems that although unstable is more commonly used, instable is often preferred in engineering and scientific contexts, e.g. "aircraft instability", "instable algorithm". Are there any differences in the implied meaning of the two terms? Should unstable be preferred? Answer I have not seen the word "instable" being used often. The word "instability" exists, though. Funnily, the word "unstability" does not exist. And even in engineering, the same two words are used - "unstable sorting algorithm", "unstable equilibrium", and as you said, "aircraft instability". Instability is just the noun form of unstable. EDIT from comments: The word "unstability" does exist, apparently, but is rarely used. I personally have never seen it. Even the spell check in Firefox marks it as a spelling mistake and suggests "instability" instead.
Read more

time - English notation for hour, minutes and seconds

I often see English notation about time using the " and ' symbols. I have always mistaken about the two, and even their meaning. I'm more used to "01:05:56", for example. How do you represent the hour, minutes, and seconds using the apostrophe and quotes punctuations? Which is for the hour, which is for minutes, and which is for seconds? Is it the common way to write duration of time elapsed? Do they have a special pronunciation? Answer It's not particularly common for expressions of time. It's similar to degrees-minutes-seconds: instead of decimal degrees (38.897212°,-77.036519°) you write (38° 53′ 49.9632″, -77° 2′ 11.4678″). Both are derived from a sexagesimal counting system such as that devised in Ancient Babylon: the single prime represents the first sexagesimal division and the second the next, and so on. 17th-century astronomers used a third division of 1/60th of a second. The advantage of using minute and second symbols for time is that it o...
Read more