English Language & Usage Asked on March 16, 2021
I have noticed that the diphthong /aʊ/ occurs before certain consonants. We have:
BUT, we don’t have /aʊp/, /aʊb/, /aʊg/, /aʊk/, /aʊm/ (although I only know one word, trauma in which it occurs) etc. Is this a coincidence or there is a rule for this? I guess there’s something that needs uncovering but I really don’t know what. Can someone please explain this?
I actually wrote a long post about this topic on the Linguistics SE site: you can see it at Why English is missing some phoneme sequences (/aʊv/ or /aʊp/).
Incidentally, trauma is only pronounced with /aʊ/ when it is given a "foreignizing" pronunciation. The anglicized pronunciation uses the thought vowel, the usual pronunciation of the digraph "au" in English.
As you may know, a major source of Modern English /aʊ/ is the Middle English long vowel /uː/, which changed to /aʊ/ as part of the "Great Vowel Shift". For some reason, /uː/ did not undergo this change before a labial consonant (p b m f v): it was either retained as /uː/ (as in room) or in some cases shortened to /ʌ/ or /ʊ/.
The velars are a bit harder to explain. It seems like for /g/, there just weren't many words of the appropriate form to historically lead to a sequence of /aʊg/, but there are some words where shortening seems to have occurred to /uː/ before /k/.
A general pattern seen in English and in some other languages also is that more complexity is allowed in syllables ending with a coronal consonant (d t s n tʃ l all fall in that category) than in syllables ending with another kind of consonant. This more theoretical, abstract point might help explain the pattern of which syllables /aʊ/ is restricted to, although this point doesn't clearly explain why other diphthongs such as /aɪ/ are not restricted the same way (/aɪm/ and /aɪk/ are frequently found in English words).
Correct answer by herisson on March 16, 2021
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