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Germanic Lexicon Project
Message Board
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Author: Sean Crist (Swarthmore College)
Email: kurisuto at panix dot com
Date: 2005-10-13 20:10:52
Subject: Re: Dialectal pronunciations
> Thank you, Sean. This is interesting. Do you know of any standard words
> that have actually been created because of this practice? That is, words
> that started out as mispronunciations, but are now accepted as the norm?
Just as an aside, linguists generally don't describe language change as "starting out as mispronunciations." We don't classify language use as "good" or "bad"; we just describe things as they are. Of course, it happens often that there are usages which are measurably more common among non-prestige social groups; those are the usages which are often prescriptively described as "bad".
I can't think of a case where the intrusive /r/ we were discussing has been lexicalized (made into part of the word). Roughly the reverse happened in pairs such as curse/cuss, arse/ass. "Curse" and "cuss" are the same word, historically speaking. In an r-dropping dialect, "cuss" lost the /r/; then that word was borrowed back into the standard American dialect as a separate word.
--Sean