> [Torsten:] > 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).
>
> Not quite. Trilled [r] is of course a lot harder to learn than some
acceptable realisation of /s/ or /z/. My point is that a person with
even slightly impaired tongue-tip control would be extremely likely
to have problems with the articulatory discrimination of the three
series of Polish sibilants (spelt <s>, <sz> and <s'>; foreigners
often find it the hardest chapter of Polish phonetics). It is the
_system of contrasts_, not the individual sounds, which is difficult.
Children learn to produce the correct distinctions -- that is, fully
acquire the system -- about the same age that they master trilled
[r]. Even in a child of six or seven any residual problems are
usually treated as developmental, which indeed usually proves to be
the case. Needless to say, there are also older kids and grown-up
people with this sibilant problem, and many of them can't trrrill
their rrr's either. The diagnosis may be anything: brain damage
(congenital or acquired), partial paralysis of the tongue, or
(sometimes) unconscious imitation of the wrong speech model by a
perfectly healthy individual.
>
> Piotr
I was just about to contradict you out of habit, when I realized that
you had again agreed with me, namely in that it is possible for
Spanish to have /s^/, /z^/ > /x/ without a similar detoriation in
trilled apical /r/. Thank you!
Against your steady state uvular/trilled /r/ theory, I would venture
a big bang uvular /r/ theory: According to my phonology teacher, Hans
Rischel, there was a tendency away from trilled to flapped apical or
uvular /r/ in Europe (Note that Scotland and North Sweden still have
trilled /r/. The standard "explanation" for this tendency is that
since people spend more time indoors, there is no need for a noisy
trilled /r/. But there is such a thing as a subclinical poisoning,
ie. without symptoms serious enough that any doctor would care.
Torsten