Which speech impediments contain the phonemes affected by said impediments?

Question

There are at least a few terms used to describe specific speech impediments which are themselves difficult for a person with said speech impediment to say. For example: - Li**s**p: Frequently conceived of as causing a person to pronounce the letter "s" as "th", although other forms of the condition exist. - **R**hotacism: Inability to pronounce the letter "r". - **B**laesitas: Softening hard consonants and hardening soft consonants; including the pronunciation of "b" as "v" or "p". Are there more examples like this? Was this a deliberate choice (presumably related to alliteration), or is it merely coincidental? I'm sure doctors wouldn't have chosen these words specifically because the affected people can't pronounce them, but is there an explanation of why these terms in particular were adopted?

Answer 1

I think it's generally a coincidence, if not a factor of how language tends to reflect what it's describing. I doubt anyone was doing anything intentionally, like you mentioned.

I searched EtymOnline, which has always been a fairly reliable and well-researched source. I found the following:

lisp (v.)

sometimes lipse, late 14c. alteration of wlisp, from late Old English awlyspian "to lisp, to pronounce 's' and 'z' imperfectly," from wlisp (adj.) "lisping," which is probably imitative (compare Middle Dutch, Old High German lispen, Danish læspe, Swedish läspa). General sense "speak imperfectly or childishly" is from 17c. Transitive sense from 1610s. Related: Lisped; lisping. Suggestive of effeminacy from 14c.

You asked if there were other examples of speech-sound errors. There are many. They're often called phonological processes. You can follow this link to a chart (https://littlebeespeech.com/resources/pdf/phonological_processes.pdf).

A phonological process is a specific type of error. When we're growing up, we often make speech errors just as a factor of being a child and not having the auditory acuity to differentiate certain sounds and/or the ability to coordinate the articulators to produce the sounds. It's normal.

But. Some children, for a variety of reasons, may not grow out of these "processes". If they pass a certain age and/or if the errors are just too excessive, we may diagnose the child with a phonological process disorder.

This is different than an articulation disorder, which tends to be a factor of mechanical movement and structural features, e.g., an oral tongue tether/tongue-tie that literally prevents you from articulating, for example.