Alveolars make my friend want to be lazy
Sometime in February, my friend was planning to go to the library but instead he said, “Bye guys, I’m going to the libary.”
I pointed out, “Don’t you mean library?”
And to be smart, he replied, “Yeah, and Valentimes Day is coming up too.”
Most people rarely make these mistakes, but when we are younger and developing our speech patterns and learning new words, we tend to add, delete, or replace phonemes that break the pattern of the speech and make it harder to say, such as deleting the “r” in library and changing the “n” to an “m”. Those syllable structure in library, mainly the “bra” is harder to pronounce then “ba” because you make the “r” sound with your teeth and when following the “b” it is harder to do an alveolar. The same is true with “im” being easier then the “in”. You are dealing with the same alveolars, and it is harder to pronounce most alveolars in the coda.
This reminds me of my 1 1/2 yr old niece who says poons rather than spoons and [kuls] instead of school. Poons, like libary is just easier to say.
I’m not entirely sure I understand your story, Tyler, but let me see what I can figure out. Does your friend believe that “library” is produced as “libary”, just as most people say February without the first /r/? True, these are both /br/ combinations, which are quick phonological transitions and are easy to miss for people with auditory processing disorders. Is “libary” a dialectal variant? Was it just a one-time speech error? Or was it the way your friend really thinks it’s pronounced?