I’ve had fun thinking about list in your last paragraph.

I think I’ve heard shplit, shpring, shtreet, shcream, and shtudent. I’ve never heard anyone say smew or sphragistics. Now excuse me while I check my online Oxford Dictionary…

…and thank you an intereshting discussion!

I think that one’s been around for a long time. I associate it with the ‘received pronunciation’ (posh voices) used on the BBC and in other media way back in the 30’s and 40’s. Does that ring a bell? And is Kathryn harking back to an earlier time?

After the Christchurch earthquakes, when people were offering accommodation and facilities for displaced people, all I could hear was “People can come and use ayur sharz” (“our showers”).

The process is called palatalization by some, and affrication by others, depending on whether they are looking at the ‘place of articulation’, or the ‘manner of articulation’.

Either way, it causes the ‘s’ to be pronounced as ‘sh’ in this context, much as English speakers have learnt to pronounce ‘Sri Lanka’.

The same process affects the ‘t’ in words like tree – compare “The shree in the Garden of Eden was an apple shree”, with markedly unnatural “The tree in the garden of Eden was an apple tree.”

The sentence ‘I dreamed about an apple tree in Sri Lanka’ shows how similar ‘tree’ and ‘Sri’ are, and shows that ‘dream’ is also affected (‘jreem’).

But, ‘s’ is an unusual letter in that it’s the only consonant that can appear before ‘tr’ at the start of a syllable, and so it is especially sensitive to its environment, and given that ‘tr’ and ‘dr’ are so variable, it’s no surprise to find such an interesting piece of language variation.

It would be interesting to know how people pronounce words such as split, sclera, spring, street, scream, square, smew, spew, student, skewer, and more obscure, but still recognizable ones such as sphragistics.