Hwangbo, Young-Shik. 2015. High vocoids in English: A diachronic analysis. Studies in Phonetics, Phonology and Morphology 21.3. 517-533.

This paper analyzes the sequences of high vocoids (/ji, ju, wi, wu/) from a diachronic perspective, focusing on their distribution. /ju/-related phenomena have been dealt with, producing various suggestions or accounts about its underlying status, optional /j/-deletion, the position of /j/ in a syllable, co-occurrence restrictions between /j/ and its neighboring sounds, different behaviors of /ju/ and /wi/, etc. This paper does not tackle these issues directly, but instead investigates the distribution of high vocoid sequences (/ji, ju, wi, wu/) which appear in the CELEX Lexical Database, and examines how they have changed through time. The results reveal that /ju/ is very peculiar in that almost all the words with /ju/ have been added to English by continuous influx of French or Latin words, in most of which /ju/ is represented by the single letter <u>, not by two letters. In contrast, the majority of /wi/ words are native words, and /wi/ is represented by two letters. /wu/ and /ji/ words are very few, but almost all of them are native words. It is concluded, thus, that the peculiarity of the sequence /ju/ might be related to the idiosyncratic behavior of /ju/ frequently observed in the issues mentioned above. (Sungkyul University)