Honestly, I don’t think changes in pronunciation happen because of “laziness”. They may be due to what sound clusters are more natural to speakers of a particular language, but that’s different from calling it laziness which has a strong connotation of morality. I’ll defer to the judgement of our linguists.
I know that to me, “axe” and “ask” are equally easy to pronounce.
ETA: “koo-pon” and “kyoo-pon” sound equally right to me, and I have no idea which one I would use when speaking English naturally.
Regional dialects, especially within the U.S. have always fascinated me. The only folks I’ve known to use the “aks”, “liberry” thing are blacks and people from the deep South. The “yoo” in place of “oo” is, I believe a Texas/southwestern innovation. I base this assumption on conversations with an old friend of mine from Texas who went to extremes in this matter (e.g. “He NYOO he was dyin’ when they started stickin’ those TYOOBS into 'im”.) One of the more interesting ones is the Americanized Spanish word “remuda” (a string of saddle horses). In Spanish, of course, it’s rem-OO-da… but anyone from the western U.S. will say rem-YOU-da. Oddly enough, when this one gets to western Canada the process is reversed… they say rem-OO-da just like the Mexicans.
One of the more interesting and unique regional accents I know of is the one my wife and her family speak… the Ohio (ah-HI-uh) Valley dialect or “Pittsburghese” which is absolutely distinctive; I’ve never heard anything else that even resembles it.
For those interested, Wikipedia has a very thorough article on American dialects.
Of course “February” has an “r” in its pronounciation, but I’ll have to pay more attention when February rolls around to make sure.
“Coupon” goes with way for me. When talking about bits of paper for commerce, I tend toward “cue-pon,” and when talking about test samples, I tend toward “coo-pon.” They’re really two different words with different means to me, but they can just as easily be homonyms.
What bugs me about “aks” is when someone is otherwise speaking standard English (meaning, standard for my area in my demographic), and out comes “aks.” It’s almost race baiting, akin to using “niggardly” in a conversation.
Well, supposedly the average adult has a vocabulary of 17,000 word families. I’d be surprised if somebody (even the most Oxford educated) does not use a “lazier” pronunciation of one of those 17k words.
I used “lazy” as a placeholder to describe expenditure of calories and not morality. If it takes 0.002 calories to say “ax” but it takes 0.003 calories to say “ask”, I think civilization will evolve to pronounce it as ax.
If you say “ask” very slowly, you’ll notice that the 1st part of the sound is closing the teeth to hiss out the “s” and followed by a 2nd motion involving the back of the tongue touching the roof of the mouth to momentarily block the airflow for the “k” sound. It’s 2 motions (albeit very fast).
Saying “ax” is one motion. Observe very small children that start to speak their first words. It’s much easier to say “ax” then “ask”. They eventually grow out of it and start to to pronounce it the prim and proper “ask.” However, for the human race as a whole, that trailing “k” sound is fragile and is ripe to get dropped. It won’t tomorrow but maybe in a dozen generations.
I lived for a year with my wife in extremely rural northeast Texas. I still get a chuckle out of my wife when I refer to cooking oil as something I can only transcribe as “kyuiken ahwel”. Damn me and my lack of IPA.
But not really. All the examples you gave are instances of simply dropping a sound, i.e., one or more letters become silent but the word is otherwise pronounced as spelled. Pronouncing “ask” as “ax”, however, is pronouncing the letters in the opposite order from the spelling. I wonder if there is any example of a pronunciation that is commonly accepted as the standard pronunciation that does this. (I do not count “nookyoolar” as the standard pronunciation of “nuclear”, or “asterix” for “asterisk”.)
Also… for those who pronounce “ask” as “ax”, I wonder how they pronounce “bask”, “mask”, “flask”, “task”… ?
I wonder if that is similar to the case that many people don’t pronounce et cetera the way it is spelled, and as a result abbreviate it incorrectly as ect. rather than the correct etc.?
One aspect that hasn’t been mentioned in this thread yet is the past tense “asked” of “ask.” That may be the root of the pronunciation difference.
How would one properly pronounce “asked”? As ass-kuh-duh? Or ass-ked? Most average folks pronounce it as “ast” like “fast”. Saying “ast” is somewhat close to “ackst” From “ackst” we work backward by dropping of the “t” at the end to get present tense “acks” which looks like “ax.” Plausible theory?
I don’t buy this theory. Lazy pronunciation may account for substitutions such as “wadder” for water or or dropping consonants or syllables such as Wens-day or Li- berry but not a reversal of consonant sounds.
By this logic, how do you account for people pronouncing “street” as Sh-treet?
But it may only look like a reversal because you see the letters “sk” on the printed page and transcribe the mispronunciation as “ks”. If you erase the spelling of it from the mind, there isn’t a “reversal” … it’s just a variation of a sound.
Because the laziness evolution doesn’t effect every word in every group in every geography equally. It takes a long time. Sean Connery’s may say “shtreet” but his great great grandchildren may pronounce “street” and their great great grandchildren may pronounce it as “stree”
