From: João S. Lopes Filho
Message: 7729
Date: 2001-06-23
----- Original Message -----From: Piotr GasiorowskiSent: Saturday, June 23, 2001 9:00 AMSubject: Re: [tied] Re: uvular RVery few languages have more than two rhotics, and about 75% of those that have any rhotics at all have exactly one rhotic phoneme. As rhotic-internal contrasts are rare, rhotic of different types commonly alternate with one other both historically and synchronically. If there were a one-way evolutionary path from apical to uvular R but never back, one would expect apical trills to be rare cross-linguistically; however, apical trilled [r] is the dominant rhotic in all global language statistics and can with good reason be regarded as the unmarked or "prototypical" r-sound.In Polish, the normative pronunciation is [r] (an apical trill), but as elsewhere, there are individual speakers (including Yours Truly) who use other souns instead. Brain damage (including effects of heavy-metal poisoning) may of course be one reason why the "wrong" "r" occurs, but speech defects due to such damage would presumably affect other apicals as well. The phonemes /s/ and /z/ can be regarded as diagnostic in this regard (Polish, like Sanskrit, has three rows of sibilants and their articulatory discrimination requires fairly effective tongue-tip control). However, kids with perfectly normal brains always find [r] a difficult sound and many substitute [l] or [j] for it until they are four or five years old; it's often the last phoneme in the inventory that they learn to pronounce correctly (or the only one that they fail to master).My own rhotic is [R], a uvular trill, which is acoustically rather similar to [r] (though the pulses have a slightly lower frequency and higher amplitude); it passes almost unnoticed and is less stigmatised than a German-style dorsal fricative or glide (regarded as "harsh") or English-style rhotics, which also sporadically occur in Poland. The fact that I acquired [R] rather than [r] as a child is probably just a matter of chance -- it was simply the first near-normative kind of trill I happened to hit upon, and my sociolinguistic milieu did not discourage me from using it. I had no problems with other apicals as a child. Later in my life I learnt to pronounce the "correct" [r] and often use it in controlled mode or when speaking languages that require it. Another member of my family who uses [R] (also unaccompanied by any other defects of articulation) is my much younger sister who possibly picked it up from me. My other sister, who is almost my age, has the standard apical trill. Neither of my own children has inherited my uvular [R].Piotr----- Original Message -----From: tgpedersen@...Sent: Saturday, June 23, 2001 12:00 PMSubject: [tied] Re: uvular R
As some may remember, I once suggested a causal link between heavy
metal poisoning and the Spanish development s^, z^ > x. I first got
this idea when I read an article the title and author of which
unfortunately I have forgotten, about the spread of uvular r's in
Europe. The point that caught my attention was this: in language
communities with apical r, there are always a few individuals who use
uvular r,never the other way round. This is considered (and might
actually be) a speech defect. One of the first symptoms of brain
damage (hence of heavy metal poisoning) is paraestethia (tinglig,
sleeping) (and subsequent (partial) loss of control, cf Robert
Schumann giving up his pianist career) of finger tips and the tip of
the tongue. This might explain the spread of uvular (and the rest is
imitation).
Now of course I have a massive problem of explaining the Spanish
apical r, but as usual I can come up with a patch. Suppose the uvular
r's started in Spain, spread to France (the generally accepted
explanation is that uvular r's came from the French "prétieuses" in
the ancien régime), and then after the French occupied Spain, uvular
r's were identified with the French, hence purged.
Hm?