Re: (ptk vs bdg)

At 11:03:45 AM on Sunday, March 25, 2012, ufnkex wrote:

[...]

> BE being phon'ly way closer to Dutch and Low German than
> is AE).

Which British English? Which American English? The
unqualified statement is meaningless. (And if your notion
of BrE is anything like RP, you should realize that many of
its distinguishing features are relatively modern.)

[...]

> E.g. why and when became uvula-R so widely spread
> virtually in all German dialects, and only in the
> extremities (Switzerland, partially in Austria and
> Bavaria, and in the extreme North of the German language
> PLUS in the East-European diaspora: Poland,
> CzechoSlovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Rumania, Rusia) the
> other /r/, the apical one, is in use. AFAIK, no other
> modern Germanic language (dialect) has the uvular /r/
> variants extant in German (of which only *some* are
> similar to that of French).

None the less, the fashion spread from France, where it
seems to have become widespread during the 18th century
after getting an earlier start in Paris. I've certainly
heard it in the Netherlands, and I know that it's common in
parts of Norway. Ah, here we go: the map at
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guttural_R> gives a good
indication of its spread. It's pretty obviously a cultural
artifact.

A possibly independent instance in a Germanic dialect is the
so-called Northumbrian burr:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northumbrian_Burr>.

Brian