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Germanic Lexicon Project
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Author: Sean Crist (Swarthmore College)
Email: kurisuto at panix dot com
Date: 2005-10-12 19:24:53
Subject: Re: Dialectal pronunciations
> Hello Sean,
>
> Can you explain the "er" pronunciation of words ending in "a" commonly heard in the U.K.?
>
> Thank you,
>
> William
William,
I assume you're talking about cases like "This idea(r) is a good one," where an /r/ is inserted in an environment where it doesn't historically belong.
Human language has a clear dispreference for two vowels in a row without a consonant in between (the name for this configuration is 'hiatus'). Some languages tolerate hiatus more than others, but it tends to be a very unstable configuration over time, and some languages prohibit it. Languages have various strategies for avoiding hiatus: some languages delete one of the consecutive vowels; some languages coalesce the two vowels into one; some languages insert a consonant to break up the hiatus. The British English case which you bring up in an instance of this third strategy.
It's not hard to see how the situation arose. Standard British English would ordinarily delete the /r/ in "door", but if you delete it in "the door is...", then hiatus results. So there is a pressure to preserve the /r/ in that environment. It's not hard to see how this preserved /r/ would be generalized, so that /r/ becomes the default epenthetic (= inserted) consonant used to avoid hiatus.
--Sean