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When reading about this sound I remembered a Brazilian friend of mine who used to pronounce it as [w] or [o], (not touching the alveolum with the tongue at all) in e.g. [niːw] – Neil.
I’m pretty sure I also remember some Londoners pronouncing it that way, so I’m guessing we’re looking at a variety too? It makes me reflect on the relativity of “handbook” IPA transcription with respect to varieties.
Polish even has the grapheme <ɫ> in words like zɫoty and this one too, indeed, is pronounced (and transcribed phonemically) as [w].
Does anyone know where the IPA symbol [ɫ] was borrowed from? It seems like a [w] would have almost been a better match (well at least for the examples I mentioned).
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I’ve fixed your code I hope. 🙂 (I never know what is interpreted as code, either, it’s trial and error for me.)
I remember reading about certain accents of English (or English-based creoles, I don’t remember which) where word-final /l/ was regularly [o], (as in bibo ‘bible’). I think it was an English-based creole, I seem to remember the orthography was also bibo.
You’ve already answered the interesting question: how we get from [ɫ] to [o].
If you’re intersted in this process, Wikipedia has an article on vocalization with some references to linguistic literature.
I don’t know where the character <ɫ> was first used, but since it’s clearly derived from the Latin letter <l>, I dare say that it was first used for [ɫ], not [w]. I’d guess that a change happened in Polish after Latin-based orthography had been introduced. Does anyone know? -
Actually, it’s even more confusing. The IPA symbol is different from the Polish grapheme. IPA has a Tilde ~ as superimposed diacritic ɫ, and Polish has a struck through bar ł. [ ɫ -> w ] is a common sound change. In Bulgarian, you can see the change across colloquial varieties and the prescriptive standard. There /l/ is velarized and labialized [ɫʷ], so drop the tongue and you get [w]. The phone answer alo /aɫo/ becomes [awo]. They call the [w] realization ‘lazy l’, and it is stigmatized in higher registers, but at least a free variation allophone in reality.
My best bet for the Polish letter is that it literally shows that this l is not an l anymore, so it is struck through. I guess writers felt it became necessary after the emergence of minimal pairs to avoid confusion.
My best bet for the IPA symbol is that they made a conscious choice to use a slightly different symbol to distinguish it from the Polish grapheme. I’ve never seen the diacritic used on anything else though. You could argue it isn’t the best choice, but we’re stuck with it now.
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Ah, thanks, Alexander, for pointing this out! It’s really hard to see in a small font, I didn’t notice. Here’s the Polish alphabet with the proper <ł>=/w/: https://images.lingvozone.com/languages/Language%20Information31_files/image001.gif
But since <ɫ> and <ł> are probably never in contrastive distribution, the difference doesn’t lead to any confusion luckily.
Polish /w/ developed out of Proto-Slavic /l/, via Old Polish /ɫ/, where original /l/ was followed by another consonant, if I understand correctly. Wikipedia lists some of the relavant sound changes at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Polish#Phonetic_processes_from_Proto-Slavic, based on Stanisław Rospond. 2005. Gramatyka historyczna języka polskiego, Warszawa-Wrocław it seems (there’s no proper citation in the text, only a references list). It seems as if the change /ɫ/>/w/ (vocalization) happened in the 16th century, after Polish already had an orthography based on the Latin alphabet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-vocalization#Polish_and_Sorbian, information from Leksykon terminów i pojęć dialektologicznych, s.v. Wałczenie), and probably, as Alexander says, after [l] and [ɫ] had become different phonemes as other sound changes created minimal pairs.
Maybe we can ask Magdalena for confirmation/more information.
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