Re: [tied] Stative/Perfect; Indo-European /r/

Thanks for your illumination on this topic. You seem to know everything about everything. What a coincidence that you are right now working on an article on the pronunciation of /r/ in Old English. I would love to read it.

The conclusion I draw from what you have said is that /r/ was probably always variable in its pronunciation, and one cannot say what the archetypal pronunciation was. But I will definitely read that article by J. Catford in which he debunks the "myth" of the original trill. But I still wonder why English is the only modern Indo-European language with an approximant, non-vibrational /r/ (as far as I know, that is) - why is English so different, as it is with its preservation of initial /w/? English is also unusual in other respects, as in its notorious spelling, and in the fact that words that should have had parallel development and thus rhyme, such as "break" and "speak" (from brecan and specan) or "steak" and "weak" (from Scandinavian steik- and weik-), or "flood", "blood" and "good", "hood" and "food", "mood", do not rhyme anymore and for some reason have had anomalous developments of the vowels. Curious that such an unusual language would become the current most widely spoken language in the world, in terms of geographical extent and numbers of speakers as a second language.

Andrew Jarrette

Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:

On 05-03-01 07:01, Andrew Jarrette wrote:

> My question is, what was the probable pronunciation of
> Proto-Indo-European "r"? Specifically, was it pronounced trilled, with
> vibration, as in the majority of today's languages, or was it more like
> the commonest English pronunciation of "r", an alveolar or
> retroflex approximant, with no vibration? I know that English is rather
> special in preserving the original pronunciation of PIE "w" (although I
> hear that Flemish Dutch and a variety of Danish also preserve this
> pronunciation), and I wondered whether English was also alone in
> preserving the original pronunciation of "r", or whether English changed
> the original pronunciation of "r".

There's a long tradition of regarding the alveolar apical trill as THE
archetypal rhotic (also in the historical sense) and all other rhotics
as modern corruptions. This is nothing more than a traditional
prejudice. I'm right now finishing an article on the pronunciation of
/r/ in Old English, where I argue that it was mostly something else than
an apical trill, and that it varied dialectally just as much as it does
nowadays. There's growing consensus among those who have tackled this
problem (cf. Denton 2003 "Reconstructing the articulation of Early
Germanic *r", _Diachronica_ 20/1, pp. 11�43, available online, I
believe) that Germanic /r/ was pretty variable.

There is a recent article by J.C. Catford (2001) "On Rs, rhotacism and
paleophony" in the _Journal of the International Phonetic Association_
(31/2, pp. 171�185), where a number of changes involving rhotics in
several different IE languages are discussed, and the myth of the
original trill is somewhat debunked on grounds of phonetic
implausibility. If you ask me, phonetic variability is so characteristic
of rhotics in general that it would be stupid to insist on any
particular realisation as THE primitive one. Trills and taps are common
enough cross-linguistically, but early IE /r/'s may have had any number
of approximant variants, including retroflex and dorso-midpalatal ones
(certainly RUKI would be easier to understand and formulate if the
Indo-Iranico-Balto-Slavic /r/ was something of the latter kind, at least
syllable-finally).

Piotr

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