"TOY-OTA" OR "TO-YOTA"?
"WILL-YUM" OR "WI-(L)YUM"?
SYLLABIZING "Y" 
BETWEEN VOWELS
 © 2001 by Orchid Land Publications

C.-J. N. Bailey

[updated 2-14-01]

      To the ear of those (in the Southern States) who say To-yoda, "toy-oda" sounds downright humorous.  And if you say Wi-yum (as the sound rules of that variety require), "Will-yum" has (to say the least) very odd connotations.  What is at issue here?  It involves the allocation of consonantal and vocalic (syllable satellite) variants of the non-nasal sonorants--whose technicalities have been laid out in opL20, opL22, and opL38.  (This is the most difficult part of English phonetics; even the greatest phoneticians of Britain, Australia, South Africa, and North America have been unaware of the details--despite the writer's English phonetic transcription (The Summer Institute of Linguistics and The University of Texas at Arlington, 1985:§8; see also HERE.)
     In older kinds of English, underlying //l  r  y  w// standing between a stressed vowel or diphthong and an unstressed one (including, in rapid tempos, a mid-stressed vowel) go with the following vowel unless a # boundary intervenes--as would be the case if one said Toy#ota.  But Southerners and non-Southerners syllabize sonorants differently; so where Southerners say To-yoda--and raw-yul for "royal"--non-Southerners say Toy-oda, even in the absence of #.  (Spectrograms of different ways of saying silly and spirit are found in an Appendix to the volume mentioned above.)  Some varieties geminate //r// following a stressed heavy vowel or diphthong; it began (as northerly parts of Southern States English attest) with heavy "o," as in glory and moron (where, respectively, unstressed and mid-stressed vowels follow //f//).  Northern States English generally geminates both liquids between a stressed nucleus and an unstressed vowel.  But instead of saying Toy-yoda, speakers of this kind of English drop the /y/ beginning the second syllable in nearly all tempos.  
     With "William," matters are much less straight-forward.  For typographical simplicity, the lateral satellite will be written L here; its phonetic representation is a raised "l" having a bar through the middle.  Where //l// precedes /y/ (and this depends on ordering the change of unstressed /i/ to /y/ between /l/ and an unstressed vowel prior to the rule changing /l/ to L before any consonant in the same syllable), //l// would become a satellite dark-L in "William."    (This change does not happen in Southern and older varieties following the higher back vowels; Scottish and South African English have entirely different principles.)   
       The change of /l/ to L in the Northern States does not occur before the vowel /i/ in slower tempos, especially where each syllable is more than minimallyl stressed in precise pronunciation.  One would hear "Wi-li-am."  But in the phase in which more rapid /wil~yum/ (where "u" is really a shwa) is heard as the result of changing unstressed /i/ to /y/ before an unstressed vowel (other than /i/, as in carriage), a subsequent application o f the change of /l/ to L yields /wiLyum/.  It is perfectly normal and natural in the regions in question, however inelegant in may sound on the stage.  But Southerners in America and Britain first syllabize //l// with the following /i/ and retain this syllabization when that /i/ becomes /y/; the resulting tautosyllabic /ly/ simplify to /y/ in normal tempos.  Hence, Wi-yum.   Does the reader say La Hoy-a or La Haw-ya for Spanish La Jolla?  This is the marked order in which one rule is inoperative; linguistic theory allows for its proneness to become, in time, unmarked, if that would allow both rules to function.  In the other, "unmarked" order in which both rules (rather than only one) function, //l// becomes L before the consonant /y/, as already observed.
     Let's review William in detail in the light of what has been said.  First to be observed is that after unstressed //i// has changed to  /y/ before an unstressed vowel in -ion, -ia, -ious, etc., the resulting combination of /ly/ (preceded by a stressed nucleus) is heard as such only in very precise pronunciations in slow tempos.  Where Northern States English changes //l// to L before the /y/, older Southern types of English (in normal conversational tempos and even in slower tempos for frequent words--say, when one's brother is named William and he is not called "Bill") reduce syllable-initial /ly/ to [y].  Hence, Wi-yum.  Cf. million, rebellion, scallion, collier/y, etc.  The "gulped" Northern L in these words is unpleasant to the Southern ear.  Bullion has a special development in that a stressed long syllabic lateral is followed by -yun.  For other details and other specific examples (especially gall'ry, sal'ry, cel'ry, scull'ry, chol'ra, and the like), see the pages of this website cited above, where phonetic symbols are used in .pdf format.