As X-ray images show, the contrast in
Swedish is between laminal dentals and apical postalveolars. The latter are only
moderately "retroflex" (not distinctively subapical, at any rate):
Languages in which coronal obstruents
and nasals are typically dental rather than alveolar often show allophonic
retraction and apicalisation next to an /r/ (for physiological reasons a dental
trill or tap is ruled out, so the anterior-most coronal trills are alveolar, and
apical rather than laminal). The retracted allophones may be phonologised in the
right circumstances. In Swedish, therefore, /r/ patterns with the "retroflex"
sounds, all of them being apical and retracted with respect to the dental
series.
Perhaps Old Indic was like that, too. The
question is really just how retroflex the "cerebrals" were. In terms of
distinctive features, the most important difference between them and the
"dentals" was that the latter (as well and the "palatals") were laminal.
Phonologically, the "cerebrals" were in the same class as /r/, so if they
were emphatically retroflex (subapical), it's likely that /r/ was also truly
retroflex. If they were alveolar or postalveolar but not strongly
retroflex, neither was /r/. At any rate, the fact that /r/ was an active
participant of consonant-harmony processes suggests that it had at least one
marked feature capable of spreading -- it was [+X], where X was whatever
made the cerebrals cerebral (dentals being [-X]).
Lastly, different dialects of
Old Indo-Aryan may have had different degrees of retroflexion and different
r-sounds. English shows that most varieties of rhotics known to phoneticians can
be found in accents of one and the same language. :))
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, June 23, 2001 5:57 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Sanskrit /r/
On Sat, 23 Jun 2001 10:35:20 +0200, "Piotr
Gasiorowski"
<gpiotr@...>
wrote:
>But postalveolar sounds are made behind the upper teeth as
well. If the flapped or tapped /r/ was retracted but not subapical,
>and
if the retroflex variant was only slightly so, how would a naive observer have
known the difference? I think the phonological
>argument remains very
strong: /r/ triggers retroflex place assimilation
So does Swedish
/r/. Is the Swedish phoneme alveolar or retroflex?
>as well as
retroflex consonant harmony across an
>intervening vowel. I can't imagine
an ordinary alveolar doing such things.