23. Diphthongs and Consonants

Chapter 23 traces the treatment of ME diphthongs [ai, iu, eu, au, oi, ou] from 1450 onward. Special attention is given to the individual paths of development and the variation of these vowels in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England and in the North American colonies.The second half of the chapter outlines the principal characteristics of the English and New England consonant systems during the colonial period, highlighting the variants that composed the colonial feature pool. Conservative pronunciations such as [kn] and [nh] for [kn], /x/ for [gh], and /u/ or /w/ for [w] were still relatively common in rural areas of seventeenth-century England and were absorbed into the colonial American feature pool but were clearly recessive. (cf. “sharedness principle”, Chapters 11 and 12).The chapter concludes with a discussion of palatalization, particularly its tendency to be elided in colonial Massachusetts after /t/ & /d/, /k/ ~ /g/, /n/, “figure” [ˈfɪgəɹ], “congratulate” [ˈgɹæduːaləi] and in other environments. This section synthesizes our discussion of the genesis of colonial American English and attempts to identify the major phonetic features of Franklin’s idiolect prior to his fifteen-year stay in London.Because consonants are relatively resistant to phonetic change, this discussion is more restricted than the detailed analysis of the vocalic system presented in preceding chapters. Nevertheless, several important questions are addressed: What was the precise quality of /r/? Was it apical, retroflex, or an approximant? When did postvocalic /r/-loss occur in Massachusetts, and was r-lessness a feature of Franklin’s speech? Was the lenition of intervocalic /t/ an American innovation or inherited from earlier English? Careful examination of Franklin’s Reformed Mode of Spelling, alongside New England town records and orthoepists’ descriptions, provides solid evidence to answer these questions.