From: Miguel Carrasquer
Message: 36545
Date: 2005-03-01
>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.Also Armenian, I think.
>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)