Interesting linguistics post, all about the r/s thing.

[conuly]

Now with 25% more bathroom graffiti!

Please thank squittycat for this.

What's really cool is that something vaguely similar happened in Latin (and I was just discussing this with my mother, too!) See, in Latin, the third declinsion kindasorta has the ending -s for the singular nominative case. So rex, regis is really regs, regis (with the stem being reg) except that voiced stops assimilate to unvoiced stops before s (so urbs is pronounced urps). This was true for the word honos, honosis, which meant honor. However, there was a language-wide change where s between vowels became r, so for a long time we had the irregular honos, honoris. And then the noun regularized into honor, honoris, giving us the word honor that we have today. It's still kinda irregular, but it's the third declension, nobody cares.

Comments

[readerravenclaw.livejournal.com]

And about the /h/ and /ng/: I can definitely understand that, but not across the board; only in certain dialects where the /h/ is pronounced very nasally.