4 ms·

> "falcon" (older pronunciation: "fawken") I'm unsure of the difference between the old and new here. Does anyone pronounce the "l" in "falcon" by touching the

by SamBam 5y ago

> "falcon" (older pronunciation: "fawken") I'm unsure of the difference between the old and new here. Does anyone pronounce the "l" in "falcon" by touching their tongue to the roof of their mouth? I pronounce the "l" similarly in "fault", which is kind of "fau-t". (If you're just referring to the "a" sound, like the a in "fall" vs "fat" then that's a different question, but I think quite regional.)

xeromal 5y ago
I have a hard l in my pronunciation of falcon. FAL-CON. I'm from Appalachia though so we tend to have drawn out pronunciations of everything. lol Hell, I'm pretty sure captain falcon in smash brothers also has a hard L in "falcon punch!"
- Ancapistani 5y ago
  Ozarkian here - we have names where additional syllables are added when we're annoyed with the person. It's "Karen" in normal conversation, but if she brought storebought cookies to the potluck it's "Kar-in-nuh", with the emphasis on the last syllanble. In my head, these are called "spite syllables" :)
  - xeromal 5y ago
    If that doesn't work, you can always whip out the "Bless your heart".
    - Ancapistani 5y ago
      Or "special" - "You didn't miss Karen's special cookies, did ya?" That would usually be coupled with a very veiled reference to how she put in the minimum possible effort while indirectly insulting her entire bloodline: "Oh, don't you just feel for Karen? I don't know how she gets anything done with those kids of hers." Alternatively, if the speaker wants to embarrass her in front of someone with a higher social standing; "Karen, these cookies are just the best thing ever! What do you put in these to make them so good?"
      - fknorangesite 5y ago
        > "You didn't miss Karen's special cookies, did ya?" Hah. Where I live this would mean they have marijuana in them.
Kiro 5y ago
I pronounce both falcon and fault with a full L.
Ancapistani 5y ago
Both of "falcon" and "fault" have very clear "l" sounds to me, both when I speak them or when I hear them spoken by someone else. I'm near the Missouri/Arkansas border, for what it's worth.
amanaplanacanal 5y ago
In my Dialect both of those L are pronounced.
housecarpenter 5y ago
The L in "falcon" in the spelling pronunciation is a "dark" L, which is a pretty different sound from the "light" L, but it's still there. In most accents of English L regularly manifests with the "dark" sound before a consonant or at the end of a word, and with the "light" sound elsewhere. Both L sounds involve raising the tongue, but with the light L the tip of tongue approaches the alveolar ridge (the part of your gum just behind your top row of teeth), while with the dark L the tip of the tongue does the same thing, but the back of the tongue simultaneously rises towards the soft palate (this is called "velarization", and it's the same gesture that accompanies lip-rounding to form a W sound). There may be further differences depending on accent, e.g. in Cockney accents the tongue-tip gesture of dark L is lost completely so that dark L becomes a fully-fledged vowel, and it might even acquire lip-rounding and merge with W. Other accents have lost the distinction as well and generalized either light L or dark L to all positions (e.g. Scottish English tends to use dark L everywhere). In the older pronunciation of "falcon", there's no L there at all, light or dark. It was borrowed from Old French "faucon", and the L was restored in spelling via Latin influence in more or less exactly the same way as the B in "debt".

by SamBam 5y ago

xeromal 5y ago

I have a hard l in my pronunciation of falcon. FAL-CON. I'm from Appalachia though so we tend to have drawn out pronunciations of everything. lol Hell, I'm pretty sure captain falcon in smash brothers also has a hard L in "falcon punch!"

Ancapistani 5y ago
Ozarkian here - we have names where additional syllables are added when we're annoyed with the person. It's "Karen" in normal conversation, but if she brought storebought cookies to the potluck it's "Kar-in-nuh", with the emphasis on the last syllanble. In my head, these are called "spite syllables" :)
- xeromal 5y ago
  If that doesn't work, you can always whip out the "Bless your heart".
  - Ancapistani 5y ago
    Or "special" - "You didn't miss Karen's special cookies, did ya?" That would usually be coupled with a very veiled reference to how she put in the minimum possible effort while indirectly insulting her entire bloodline: "Oh, don't you just feel for Karen? I don't know how she gets anything done with those kids of hers." Alternatively, if the speaker wants to embarrass her in front of someone with a higher social standing; "Karen, these cookies are just the best thing ever! What do you put in these to make them so good?"
    - fknorangesite 5y ago
      > "You didn't miss Karen's special cookies, did ya?" Hah. Where I live this would mean they have marijuana in them.

Kiro 5y ago

I pronounce both falcon and fault with a full L.

Ancapistani 5y ago

Both of "falcon" and "fault" have very clear "l" sounds to me, both when I speak them or when I hear them spoken by someone else. I'm near the Missouri/Arkansas border, for what it's worth.

amanaplanacanal 5y ago

In my Dialect both of those L are pronounced.

housecarpenter 5y ago

The L in "falcon" in the spelling pronunciation is a "dark" L, which is a pretty different sound from the "light" L, but it's still there. In most accents of English L regularly manifests with the "dark" sound before a consonant or at the end of a word, and with the "light" sound elsewhere. Both L sounds involve raising the tongue, but with the light L the tip of tongue approaches the alveolar ridge (the part of your gum just behind your top row of teeth), while with the dark L the tip of the tongue does the same thing, but the back of the tongue simultaneously rises towards the soft palate (this is called "velarization", and it's the same gesture that accompanies lip-rounding to form a W sound). There may be further differences depending on accent, e.g. in Cockney accents the tongue-tip gesture of dark L is lost completely so that dark L becomes a fully-fledged vowel, and it might even acquire lip-rounding and merge with W. Other accents have lost the distinction as well and generalized either light L or dark L to all positions (e.g. Scottish English tends to use dark L everywhere). In the older pronunciation of "falcon", there's no L there at all, light or dark. It was borrowed from Old French "faucon", and the L was restored in spelling via Latin influence in more or less exactly the same way as the B in "debt".