dissimilation

In phonology, particularly within historical linguistics, dissimilation is a phenomenon whereby similar consonants or vowels in a word become less similar or elided. In English, dissimilation is particularly common with liquid consonants such as and when they occur in a sequence. The phenomenon is often credited to horror aequi, the principle that language users avoid repetition of identical linguistic structures.

==Examples== === Dropped initial /r/ in /r..r/ sequence (r-deletion) === When an sound occurs along with another in the middle of a word in rhotic dialects of English, the most weakly-stressed tends to drop out, as in "" for berserk, "" for surprise, "" for particular, and "" for governor. This does not affect the pronunciation of government, which has only one , but English government tends to be pronounced "", dropping the first n. Nor does this phenomenon affect the unstressed syllable in words like surfer or brother, since they come at the end of the word.