The title is from The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (wash-up is the way one of the characters pronounces worship), but I owe the idea of this post to two questions. I decided not to wait for the next set of “gleanings,” because my summer schedule will prevent me from answering questions and responding to comments with the regularity one could wish for. Both questions concern Engl. r.
The first was about the status of r. Some people say that r is not a real consonant. Is it true? Yes, partly. In rate, late, mate, and Nate, the sounds r, l, m, and n, known in the phonetic nomenclature as resonants, are consonants like any other (compare Kate, pate, fate, date, etc.), but word finally they can form the crest of the syllable and thus display a feature characteristic of vowels. For example, each of the words—Peter, bottle, bottom, and button—pronounced as Pet’r, botl, botm, and butn, has two syllables, and the peak (crest) of the second syllable is r, l, m, and n. It follows that resonants sometimes behave as consonants and sometimes as vowels.
The second question requires a much more elaborate answer. Why do so many people pronounce wash as warsh? It will be easily seen that the title of today’s post was inspired by this question. In my recent discussion of wh-spelling, I referred to the weakening of Engl. h, s, f, and th, a process that has been going on for at least two millennia. Resonants are also prone to weakening. One can observe this change with a naked eye (with a naked ear?). British English is “r-less” (that is, r is not pronounced in far, for, fur, cart, horse, bird, and their likes), while in most varieties of American speech they are sounded. Obviously, the loss of r after vowels occurred in British English after the colonization of the New World by English-speakers, who preserved the traditional pronunciation of ar, or, ir, and so forth (colonial languages are always more conservative than the language of the metropolis). In similar fashion, l was lost in some positions, but that happened before the 17th century, so that here British and American English share a common cause: compare balk, talk, walk, chalk, balm, calm, alms, and salmon (in which mute l is still spelled) with bilk, whelk, and bulk (in which l is pronounced). The weakening was capricious: for instance, in Dutch a similar process took place, but the Dutch for holt “wood” (obsolete except as a last name) and salt is hout and zout: l is neither pronounced nor (providentially) spelled in them. In Scotland, golf used to rhyme with loaf (I don’t think anything has changed in the last fifty years).
After vowels, especially word finally, r disappeared not only in British English but also in some varieties of German. Occasionally other sounds, when weakened, find their last refuge in r. The name of the Greek letter that designated the sound of r is rho. Hence the term rhotacism “a change of any consonant to r.” Long ago, z was weakened to r. This is the most ancient case of Germanic rhotacism. The difference between was and were, rai