From: Mate Kapovic
Message: 36554
Date: 2005-03-02
----- Original Message -----
From: "Miguel Carrasquer" <mcv@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, March 02, 2005 9:02 AM
Subject: Re: [tied] Stative/Perfect; Indo-European /r/
On Wed, 02 Mar 2005 08:52:04 +0100, Piotr Gasiorowski
<gpiotr@...> wrote:
>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.
MCV >Even the peculiar affrication of initial tr- is not unique
>to English. The country of Chile was named after the
>Araucanian (Mapundungu) word Trile. In Chilean Spanish, tr-
>is affricated as in English (perhaps an effect of the
>Araucanian substrate), and -rr- [also in Argentina, Perú] is
>an alveolar fricative (much more friction than in English,
>more like Czech <r^> but usually without vibration of the
>tongue). In some Caribbean variants of Spanish, -r- becomes
>/l/. In Puerto Rico ([pwelto Xiko]), /r/ = /l/ and /rr/ is
>usually a uvular fricative (tending to voiceless).
Uvular fricative as a realization of /rr/ is present also in various
Portuguese variants (even in standard Lisboa dialect). In many dialects of
Brasil the uvular fricative has changed to a plain _h_. Also, the devoicing
of /r/ can be very interesting and different in various languages.
Mate