Re: uvular R

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: tgpedersen@...
> To: cybalist@...
> Sent: Saturday, June 23, 2001 12:00 PM
> Subject: [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?
>
> Torsten

--- In cybalist@..., "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...> wrote:
> Very 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.
>
Which is a good argument unless "roll-back" of uvular r can occur; I
believe I read that there was once in some circles in Russia people
speaking with uvular r's and that this was considered effete
and "French" (and probably didn't survive the revolution for long,
being shibboletly associated with the wrong class).

> 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).
>
Hm. I think this means that you're saying:

1) apical /r/ is no harder to pronounce than /s/ and /z/, therefore
uvular /r/ alone is no indicator of brain damage.

2) apical /r/ is the last phoneme Polish children learn (hence
presumably the hardest to learn).

Difficult to reconcile. So I would tend to believe that you agree
with me after all (that it is possible to have solely a damaged /r/
as a result of a damaged brain).

> 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
>
>
>
Aha! That accused concept of coincidence strikes again at one of my
schemes!
One of the joys of being Danish is that I don't have to pronounce an
apical /r/ which I am incapable of (at least the trilled version) for
whatever reason; the closest I get is a right-side (dextro-?)lateral
trill. Since I've never had to pronounce it before I learned English
at school (at about the same time I started breaking fluorescent
tubes for fun on a nearby garbage dump) I don't know for certain when
I acquired this incapability.

But I have wondered whether the to non-linguists so important concept
of "guttural" has anything to do with it?

Torsten