Date:  Tue, 31 Oct 1995 00:09:12 -0500

From:  ALICE FABER <faber[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]HASKINS.YALE.EDU>

Subject: Re: Sulking Over Silky Milk etc



Garland D. Bills writes:



> Peter McGraw: Be amazed! I consistently say [mik], though with a back

> off-glide in my casual speech. I bet Dennis Preston, Bethany Dumas, and

> many others do too.



I'll bet you're right. I have only anecdotal evidence for this, but...back

when the whole notion of external evidence in phonology was a new and wondrous

thing, a classmate of mine in grad school had one of those day care disasters

that required him to bring his son in to campus and rely on a host of

volunteer babysitters. The son at the time was 5 or 6, right at that age of

invented spellings that Charles Read has written about extensively. For most

of the afternoon, we had this kid standing on a chair in front of a blackboard

writing words while we tried not to ooh and ah too audibly. When we asked him

to write "milk", he very confidently wrote MUK.



I don't have any actual acoustic data to supplement this, but Marianna Di

Paolo and I have tons of data for PILL and HILL, PEEL and HEEL. Even in these

words, with no following C to trigger "deletion" of /l/, a true phonetic [l]

nonetheless is quite rare. It's much more common, for our Utah speakers, and,

to a lesser extent, for our Northeastern speakers, to have the same strong

offglide that Garland reports for MILK.



Alice Faber