You never hear about vowels on radio or TV and you almost never read about them in the papers—not even the New York Times. Everyone talks freely about the sturdy, up-standing consonant, but the problem of loose vowels carries such a stigma, everyone avoids discussing it. Well, the time has come to bring this threat to our linguistic well-being out of the closet. Today YourDictionary once again breaks the mold and speaks frankly about this culturally stigmatized verbal debilitation.
Some people call this "the single quote disease" because it has even crept into our literature. I am sure you know courageous writers probing this problem by spelling police as "p'lice" or suppose as "s'pose," emulating the speech of those suffering from loose vowels. That is right. The vowels in the speech of some English language speakers have become so loose that they have fallen completely out of some of their words! It is the pyorrhea of words, a form of lexical baldness, a modern plague of the English tongue.
My own son brought the lesson home years ago in a very personal way. Asked to create a poster about pollution, he created a minor masterpiece of a bulldozer on a garbage dump entitled, "Don't Plute!" When I asked him about it, he replied, "My teacher told us all about p'lution and asked us to draw a poster about it, and that is what I did!" He contracted this disorder from his second-grade teacher. Fortunately, his father was a doctor of linguistics and treated him in time.
The origin of LVS is clearly Merry Old England, where Worcester has been worn down to "Wooster," library is pronounced "libr'y" and laboratory is "laborat'ry" ("lab'ratory" in the U.S.) How many young men have seen their naval "c'reers" destroyed because they thought the forecastle was a sail, given its usual pronunciation, "fo'c's'le" ['fok-sêl]? (Do not think for a moment that there are no costs associated with LVS.)
Southerners in the U.S. have borne the greater stigma of this malady. Their dialects are the most conservative of the U. S. dialects, having changed less since the migrations from England. The southern case is a perfect example of the advanced stages of the disease left untreated: the vowels become so loose, adjoining consonants also fall out of words. In rural areas Southerners now pay little attention to a word until they are in the middle of it. Alligators down South are simply "'gators," raccoons are reduced to "'coons," tobacco is "'backer," tomatoes are "'maters" which can be found in "Lana, Jawjuh," home of the famous soft drink, "Co-cola."
I am sure you noticed that Southerners drop more than just an unaccented vowel. What we see here is the disease in its advanced stages. The vowels become so loose, that adjoining consonants lose their footing. If further left untreated, LVS spreads from syllable to syllable until little is left to recognize the word by. Today, English speakers throughout the world commonly drop the unaccented vowel from "probably" and end up saying "probbly." But those in the advanced stages of the affliction even have difficulty controlling the consonant on either side of that vowel and, more and more, we hear only "prolly" for this originally trisyllabic word.
As the disorder spreads to the ears, the resultant mispronunciations begin to sound normal. Many of the words caused by LVS have already made their way into our permanent vocabulary: "taint" is a "c'ruption" of attaint, "tend" should be attend, "curtsy" came from courtesy so long ago it has taken on a meaning of its own. Many dictionaries now prefer "alarm" to the original alarum and "chirp" to the original chirrup. Aeroplane is now pronounced and spelled "airplane" since the evaporation of the unaccented [o]. If this "c'rosion" of our language continues, the syrup we slurp today could be tomorrow's "sirp."
The best way to understand the seriousness of the problem left unattended is to examine a historical case. We all know that Latin is a dead language but few realize the cause of death. All the evidence points toward LVS. Just look at Latin words like iterare and castellus. Today they are "errer" and "chateau" in French, pronounced [shato]—only the [a] and [t] remain. The spelling of Latin feminina in French, "femme," still retains memories of a vowel and consonant long since dropped from its pronunciation, [fem].
Words like these make the progress of LVS painfully obvious: first unaccented vowels, then consonants, then the cycle is repeated over and over until even a once proud language like Latin is reduced to French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. Not even the powerful Catholic Church could impede the progress of LVS. The people of the Roman Empire, who once spoke a single language and understood each other, today speak several mutually incomprehensible languages. It could happen to English!
The final question is, of course, what can we do to stop the spread of this linguistic plague before English is reduced to several mutually unintelligible languages? We can't ask the government to step in, since it is part of the problem: most of us now mispronounce that word "gov'ment." The Center for Linguistic Disease Control asserts that LVS comprises three sets of symptoms we must watch for, each with a scientific, medically sounding name:
Aphesis—dropping an initial vowel, as in 'cept (accept? except?), 'tention (attention), 'rithmetic, (arithmetic), 'bout (about);
Apocope—dropping a final vowel, as in mate, mete, mite, mote, mute (the so-called "silent e" isn't silent, it has long since vanished forever in our speech);
Syncope—(as in 'syncopation') dropping internal vowels, as in p'lute, p'lice, prob'ly, cam'ra, s'crete, s'cum to scum, to Clyde on the parkway and go d'reckly to the hospital while your car is towed to a g'rage.
So, what is the treatment for this malady? The first step is to reduce alcohol intake (alcohol and vowels don't mix). Second, reduce your stress levels. Stress tends to speed up speech tempo and we need to reduce it. Finally, everyone should take one of YourDictionary's Words of the Day (seriously) per day, every day, paying close attention to pronunciation. Whatever you do, don't let words accumulate in your inbox over the weekend. Consultation from time to time with a doctor of linguistics such as Dr. Language is always good advice. If you follow this regimen, you should build up a strong resistance to LVS.