Talk:Hew-cluster reduction

Um. What is going on here? The hew/yew "merger" is nonexistant as has been covered in previous discussion on Talk:Phonemic differentiation "Merger" refers to when speakers lose the distinctions between two (or more) phonemes. This sometimes results in the creation of homophones from previously distinctly pronounced pairs...but the process of becoming homophones is a side-effect of a merger, not the defining characteristic thereof. Anyways, the homophonization of hew and yew is not only not a merger, the phenomenta that cause it are already amply covered by two other well-grounded articles: h-dropping and hypercorrection. More to the point, however, this article is horribly named. What "cluster" is being reduced? Also, please, provide evidence for the assertion that in some dialects of English, /hj/ has coalesced into /ç/! Where is it "sometimes considered" a type of glide-cluster reduction? Tomer ^TALK 19:32, May 22, 2005 (UTC)

I agree it's not a merger, but I don't see what it's got to do with hypercorrection. The cluster that's being reduced is /hj/, reducing to /j/. I don't know if anyone's ever claimed there's an accent of English with /ç/ as a phoneme, but it's quite widely claimed that [ç] is a possible realization of underlying /hj/ in English. References include Gimson, An introduction to the pronunciation of English, 3rd edn. p. 212; Ladefoged, A course in phonetics, 4th edn., p. 144; Wells, Accents of English p. 230. Wells is the one who groups the changes /hw/ → /w/ and /hj/ → /j/ together under the label "Glide cluster reduction". --Angr/_comhrá 20:06, 22 May 2005 (UTC)