The wardrobe in the bedroom

[pne]

The wardrobe in the bedroom: an interesting article in John Wells’s phonetic blog, about juncture or syllabification and how it influences the difference between pairs such as nitrate and night rate or great ape and grey tape.

With a side discussion on how some (including Prof. Wells and I) pronounce words such as bedroom, beetroot, and wardrobe as if be-droom, bee-troot, and war-drobe (or bedr-oom, beetr-oot, and wardr-obe, if you prefer) rather than bed-room, beet-root and war-drobe, while other, similar words such as headroom often do not receive such treatment (and again, I happen to follow Prof. Wells in this).

This is possibly connected to the age of acquisition of such words (bedrooms are a much more common topic of conversation for children than headroom) and/or the degree to which such words are felt as being a single word rather than a compound.

Comments

[steorra]

Interesting. I have a hard time telling whether I'm saying dr with or without a syllable break; with tr it's easy.

I syllabify beet-root, not bee-troot. But it's a word I don't normally say; if I were talking about the vegetables, I'd just talk about beets, or a beet; so probably not something I acquired at a young age.