英語の語頭有声歯摩擦音/ð/ が消えるとき

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  • エイゴ ノ ゴトウ ユウセイ ハ マサツオン ð ガ キエル トキ
  • When the word-initial voiced dental fricative /ð/ in English disappears

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抄録

The objective case of the third person plural pronoun, i.e., them often takes the form of 'em when it is pronounced as its weak/unstressed form in informal speech of Present-day Standard English (PSE). Here, however, what the apostrophe abbreviates is not the voiced dental fricative /ð/ sound which is spelled <th>, because this kind of sound-dropping does not seem phonetically relevant. As a matter of fact, this abbreviation is thought to be /h/-dropping of hem, which was the forerunner of them in PSE and used in Middle English; them was a loanword from Old Norse and not derived from the original native pronoun in Old English. Therefore we find that even now we are still using in our spoken language a revised version of the ancient third person plural pronoun. Then, does the word-initial /ð/ sound in English never drop in any environment? In reality, we can say that we do have some examples of that kind. One of such cases is assimilation of the /ð/ sound by the immediately preceding /n/ sound in the strings like in the or on the in informal speech; they sound like /innə/ or /ɔnnə/. Also we have some idioms like at last, etc. or interjections like attaboy, etc., and especially in the latter we are sure to find the phenomenon to be regarded as a pure kind of word-initial /ð/-dropping, because there is no sound at all before the dropped /ð/ sound of the expression.

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