Re: uvular R

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: tgpedersen@...
> To: cybalist@...
> Sent: Thursday, June 28, 2001 6:30 PM
> Subject: [tied] Re: uvular R
>
>
> 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

--- In cybalist@..., "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...> wrote:
> I wouldn't say that apical trills exist because there is eternal
equilibrium between [r] and other rhotics. They exist because the
common-or-garden apical trill is an important stage in the natural
life cycles of consonants.
>
> Apical taps or flaps often cooccur with trilled [r] as positional
or allegro-speech allophones of /r/. A tap can be regarded as a
minimal, one-phase variant of the corresponding trill. However, if
[r] changes into a completely untrilled or uvular rhotic, this
certainly represents an irreversible or hard-to-reverse qualitative
shift. But then all lenitions are like that -- and if it's true that
uvular [R] is for some reason easier to pronounce than [r], or
cheaper in terms of effort and neuromuscular control, then [r] > [R]
_is_ a kind of lenition. [R] may be further untrilled, producing
dorsal fricatives or glides. There are also other well-known "decay
series" involving trills, e.g. alveolar trill > alveolar tap > apical
approximant > zero; or alveolar trill > postalveolar flap > retroflex
approximant > zero. Such processes, as well as uvularisation, would
have eliminated all the apical trills in the world's languages a long
time ago if lenition, or the principle of least effort, were the only
factor that counts in linguistic evolution.
>
> But as old [r]'s succumb to gradual erosion (rather slowly, since
[r] is a relatively stable consonant diachronically), new [r]'s come
into existence. First, rhotics can themselves be products of lenition
affecting obstruents or nasals -- e.g. [t] > [d] > [D] (in this
posting, [D] = alveolar tap). Next, if lenition is common in syllable-
final and intervocalic positions, strengthening is equally common
morpheme-initially or at the beginning of a stressed syllable -- that
is, in contexts which typically require phonological reinforcement.
Strengthening may transform taps or voiced alveolar fricatives into
their phonetically enhanced counterparts, i.e. trills -- this is how
rhotacism usually works. Strong trills may also develop via
assimilation from sequences like [-tD-] or [-Dz-]. Finally, rhotics
may develop from laterals in dissimilatory environments.
>
> In Scotland, by the way, /r/ is mostly a postalveolar approximant
or tap as in most of northern England; trilled [r] represents an
occasional patriotic enhancement thereof. Dorsal rhotics are all but
extinct in Britain, even in their Northumbrian focal area. But even
without Scotland, the vast majority of European languages still have
the apical trill with the usual minute proportion of various
idiosyncratic pronunciations -- here spreading, there receding on a
local scale. Uvularisation seems to be an areal phenomenon diffusing
through imitation across France and much of Northern Europe, but it
isn't general even in German-speaking countries.
>
> Piotr
>
Here's a story Rischel told his students: most f's are labiodental,
ie. upper teeth and lower lip, a few are bilabial ie. both lips, but
only in a small community in Greenland is there an upper-lip, lower
teeth f, and that because the local boss (forgot his title) had a
problem with the position of his jaw ("under-bid", it's called in
Danish). From him, this pronounciation had spread to the whole
community.
That's why I wondered whether the pronounciation difficulties
with /r/ of a few ruling class members could spread to the rest of
the population. But I still wonder if Spain could have been the
original focal point, later restored? French has uvular /r/, so does
Portuguese, are these developments necessarily independent?
Does anyone know if Spanish once had uvular /r/?

Torsten