Marshall,
Your message appears at the end of an increasingly long posting, so I've deleted everything above it.
The perceived /r/ in "warsh" is in fact not an /r/, even though English speakers hear it as that. In fact it's pharyngealization, that is, constriction of the pharynx. The same thing also happens, I understand, in some Dutch dialects. What's going on is this. The vowel in "wash", at least outside of the low back vowel merger zone, which goes from Pittsburgh to the Mississippi and then covers most of the US west of the Mississippi, is as low and as far back as the tongue can be in the mouth without producing a fricative, in this case a pharyngeal fricative like those found in Arabic. Now, a little known fact of articulatory phonetics is that when we retroflex for an [r], we also push the back of the tongue into the pharyngeal cavity (the throat). It's this effect, actually, rather than the curling back of the tongue tip, that produces [r]-coloring. So if you pronounce "wash" with a low back rounded vowel and than pull the tongue back just a little bit more, you'll get what to an Arabic speaker sounds like pharyngealization and to an English speaker like /r/.
As I commented in my response to Bruce, the first of the two vowels usually has to be a mid central or a low vowel, regardless of what the second is. So "see about", where "see" has a high front vowel, doesn't become "seer about". I'm not sure what's going on in Appalachian speech, although I've heard these forms. What is possible is a sort of analogical leveling. Since Appalachian tends to reduce final tense vowels, as in "swallow", to schwa, the schwa-final words merge with the er-final words, and they all become er-final. But this is just a guess.
What you're calling /l/ insertion is actually the insertion of a schwa to break up a cluster. /l/+consonant clusters have been unstable in English for a long time. Look at all the post-vocalic /l/ we don't pronounce, as in talk, walk, yolk, etc. Appalachian handles the problem by splitting the cluster instead. Another example is "athelete".
The use of "taken" for "took" is usually described as analogical leveling as well, reducing two forms to one and using the past participle for both. However, I can't help wondering, given the overall weakness of /v/ in English, whether it doesn't result from the deletion of "'ve", and the perfect and past merge. /v/ has been disappearing for a long time. "Lord" was "hlavord" in Early Middle English, and in Old English "lady" was "hlafdige", with the /f/ sounding like /v/. OE didn't use the letter /v/. And look at Modern English forms like "I'd a been there if I coulda."
Herb
Herb,
Besides the obvious /r/ insertion in "washing" that becomes "warshing," I don't know if anyone has done a formal study of /r/ insertion, yet I have noticed it in three different dialects: those dialects in certain parts of New England, New York City, and Appalachia. But I believe that certain phonological conditions have to take place for the /r/ to be inserted. In New England and New York City, the /r/ is inserted when one word ends in a vowel and the next word begins with a vowel. President Kennedy said "Cuber is," but didn't say "Spainer is." Someone supposedly asked Kennedy where the /r/ in "Cuber" came from, and he replied that it was the /r/ left out of "Hahvard." In Appalachian speech, an /r/ is inserted if the word ends in "ow.' So it's "holler," tobaccer" and "swaller." (You probably already know all of this, but other readers may not.)
/l/ insertion also takes place in Appalachian speech in "fillum" for "film." I believe the spelling of "colonel" is also affected by /l/ insertion. Are there others?
Herb, while I have your attention, let me ask you a question. In Appalachian speech and other parts of the United States, especially in the South, the past tense of "take" is often given as "taken." "I taken a job in the mines." But the past tense of "eat" is not given as "eaten." *"I eaten my lunch this morning." Any ideas about why?
Marshall
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