As many of you know, I spend a lot of time thinking about consonant clusters. More specifically, I’m interested in what the production of non-native clusters may tell us about the phonological processing and representation of such sequences.

In general, it seems at least plausible to me that for borrowings with phonotactically illegal onsets, literate people who produce CC sequences as CVC may nevertheless represent these words with an underlying CC. At least in English, a lot of the relevant words are proper names or brand names that people may learn by reading. On the other hand, there’s plenty of evidence from the loanword literature that the output of “first generation” speakers who repair offending sequences serves as the input to the “second generation”, who then reanalyze the underlying form.

This got me to thinking about whether google might provide any evidence for reanalysis in some of the most common English borrowings. I guess I’m not surprised, but there was in fact (limited) evidence at least for Vlasic and Dvorak:

Vlasic:

• There’s just one lowly A&P mini mart on the Upper Westside that carries a tiny bottle of Velasic
• No more huffy bikes or velasic pickles?!?!?
• Some things are worth the splurge like Vellasic pickles

Dvorak:

• Devorak: Symphony No. 9, Holst: The Planets, Mussorsky:Pictures at an Exhibition and Jenkins: Diamond Music. (interestingly contributed by someone who’s name is spelled “Jnella”)
• Stars from the East, featuring Prokofiev’s famous score from the classic Russian movie “Alexander Nevsky” and Antonin Devorak’s moving “Te Deum.”
• i love devorak’s new world symphony no. 9 and theme from amadeus’s symphony no. 25. it’s kool!
• While visiting Iowa in 1893, the Czech composer Anton Devorak hears the song of a scarlet teenager and is inspired to create a new piece of music.
• The soundtrack of my life contains music by Sheryl Crow, Blind Melon, Antonin Devorak, Tim McGraw, ABBA, and Wyclef Jean.
• It’s really powerful music cuz it’s written by one of my favourite composers, Devorak (pronounced: De-VOR-(jz)ak). (clearly, this is the best example of all!)

Anyone have any more of these? I’d love to have a collection of them.