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

On 05-03-01 20:26, Miguel Carrasquer wrote:

>> [Andrew Jarrette:]
>> 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)
>
>
> Also Armenian, I think.

Actually, there are accents of English with trilled or tapped
realisations of /r/ at least in some positions, so English as a
dialectal complex isn't entirely without them. On the other hand, there
are other IE languages with approximant/fricative rhotics (standard
French is one!), or with a contrast between two rhotic phonemes, e.g.
tap or approximant vs. a trill (Albanian, Spanish, Armenian). Widely
different realisations of /r/ can be found in dialects of German,
Danish, Portuguese, etc., etc., etc. (not to mention idiolectal
deviations from the norm, which are especially frequent in the case of
rhotics and are a never-drying source of potential innovations -- see
the recent spread of labiodental /r/ in England). English is not as
special as it might seem.

Piotr