Re: [cybalist] Re: Balto and Slavic Rs.

Gerry wrote:

> Sergei, your glottopsychological idiosyncrasy isn't only due to a
> phonological variation related to a particular Slavic language. Here in
> the US, it also can be regional. I grew up in the Merrimack Valley
> north of Boston, MA and most of the folks with whom I attended lower
> school and high school dropped the "r" in words like "father" and added
> an "r" to the ends of words such as Korea. Perhaps the culprit of this
> idiosyncrasy can be attributed to a Slavic language but I also think
> geography plays an important role. And it becomes very difficult to
> ascertain whether my Slavic friends and relatives, my Baltic friends and
> relatives, or my Italian, Irish, British, Scots, Polish, Russian, etc.
> friends learned it from their ancestors or from their acquaintences.
>
> When I moved to CA after college, I was used as an "example of a New
> England speech pattern" when I first began teaching at San Juan High
> School. For the most part, I have lost most of my "accent" but on
> occasion it does creep on through.
> Gerry

Yes, Gerry, I see your point, but the status of the phoneme r in Lithuanian
differs very much from that in English, and allophones produced as a result
of dropping or substantial change of the normative strong alveolar trill
must be very unusual.
I don't know where exactly is that native speaker quoted by Mark from, but
as far as I can recall Zinkevicius's monumental opus on today's Lithuanian
dialects, this phoneme is rather stable and the only dialectal bias is that
it's sometimes depalatalized ('hardened') in positions even before front
vowels (Polish/Belorussian influence?). If I have a chance to re-consult
this work and find something contradictory to what I wrote, I will post
immediately.
For all that, Zinkevicius wrote on 'natural' dialects, but the todays
standard Lithuanian used mainly in big towns (we have no more than 10 of
them, and the biggest has 500.000 population) has some variations as well
(Vilnius slightly differs from Kaunas etc). I've never seen any theoretical
work on that, so the chance is the social class of chatters from Klaipeda
drops their r in some positions :))

Sergei