Please keep your minds out of the gutter when reading my phonetic spellings.
I noticed a year or two ago that the American pronunciation of the word "comfortable" transposes the
r and the
t. Instead of "cum-fert-uh-bull", we say "cumf-ter-bull". We turn the
ert sound into
ter.
To rule out that this may just be some hick dialectal variation of mine (
<-- example of a double possessive, but that's another topic), I recently consulted a few dictionaries - Merriam-Webster.com and
Webster's New World Dictionary both list this as the primary pronunciation (although the print version of the former lists it as the second variant); Dictionary.com doesn't list this pronunciation at all; and my foreign language dictionaries list only the British pronunciation in which the
r is left out entirely since the Brits tend to be non-rhotic.
As far as I can tell, we only do this with the adjectival form. We don't pronounce
comfort as
cumfter or
comforting as
cumftering. Sometimes speakers add letters to words, such as an extra
i in
mischiev(i)ous and
ambidextr(i)ous or omit them as in
Feb(r)uary, but I can't think of another word off hand whose letters speakers transpose. Of course, spelling does not always keep up with pronunciation, especially in English, but I found this example particularly odd, especially since the other forms of the word don't follow the same pattern.
I'm not sure what to do with this information, but it is weird and I wanted to share it for no particular reason.
