Hol don

This morning while shaving, as I was listening to the radio around 7:30 a.m., I heard a medley of songs by three artists, all with the same title:  "Hold on".  But a funny thing happened in all three of these renditions:  whenever the singer pronounced the title phrase, it always came out as "hol don", at least to my ear.  But I don't think it was just my ear, since several times they prolonged the "hol" syllable and emphasized the "d" at beginning of the "don" syllable.

Curious, I started surfing the web, and I soon found that there are dozens, nay scores, nay hundreds of songs with this title, and they aren't all covers of one original.  I listened to about ten of them for which it was relatively easy to get an online video or recording, and — to my ear — they all seemed to be saying "hol don", some of them quite emphatically emphasizing the "d" at the beginning of the second syllable.

Then I hit a goldmine, as one often does on Wikpedia (which is also why I send them a generous gift every year in December), when I found this webpage.  It lists 16 albums with the title "Hold on" and a whopping 326 songs that have this title (I think that I counted them correctly!)

The fourth song from the end of the list is "Håll ut" (Swedish for "Hold On"), by Lars Winnerbäck from Singel.

The fourth song from the end of the list is "longdi 롱디" (Korean for "Hold On"), by Roy Kim from Home.

The very last one on the list is "Have You Seen My Baby", by Ringo Starr, which is sometimes or usually called "Hold On" because he repeats that phrase so often in it.  Hear it for yourself (the placement of the -d- is somewhat ambiguous).

Oh, and there are three films called "Hold On", and a 2015 song by Rob Thomas from The Great Unknown called "Hold On Forever".

I don't know what you make of this "hol don" phenomenon — and maybe you don't even hear it — but it struck me powerfully while I was shaving this morning.  Between the time I finished shaving and the time I finished writing this post, I had arrived at the following observations and conclusions:

1. It is harder to pronounce consonants at the end of syllables than at the beginning.

2. The omission of consonants at the end of syllables is a common feature in many languages, which is why Sinitic languages, especially Mandarin topolects, tend to lose their "entering" tones (-p, -t, -k) and French speakers "swallow up" so many word endings and why English speakers say "runnin'" instead of "running" — except when they make a special effort.  Etc., etc.  Language Log readers can provide examples from other languages with which they are familiar.

3. Syllable boundaries are not sacred.

4. A side (but still related) issue:  consonant clusters are difficult to pronounce, which is why they often tend to go by the wayside in daily speech and in phonological evolution.

5. The syllable is not the basic phonological unit of speech and writing (as some have alleged from time to time), the phoneme is.  Dǎdǎo yīnjié wéi zhōngxīn zhǔyì! 打倒音節為中心主義! / 打倒音节为中心主义! ("Overthrow / Defeat syllabocentrism!").

Just before wrapping up this post, I found the following tantalizing reference on the WWWW (Wonderful World Wide Web):

Osip Brik's “phonetic moves” and a syllabocentric theory of the phonetic architectonics of verse

Lots to talk about — in phonemes (to my mind), not so much in syllables.