--- 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,
I believe it's a tip-of-tongue vs. the rest kind of thing. Not a
question of general neuromuscular control of the tongue.
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).
But is it then possible (he asked innocently) that an alveolar tap
produced by "decay" of /r/ could be mistakenly construed as an
alveolar tap /D/ (and progress as such)?
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.
That means l > r (as in Sanskrit) I suppose?
>
> 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.
or French-speaking, for that matter.
>
> Piotr
>
Torsten