--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Andrew Jarrette <anjarrette@...>
wrote:
> 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.
>
We've had this discussion a long time ago on cybalist. My take on it
is that the replacement of apical /r/ with uvular /R/ and of /w/
with /v/ is recent and caused by French influence. The reason why it
didn't take place in English is the early stalemate between French
and native influence in England which meant /v/ ~/w/ became a kind
of shibboleth, a marker for French/non-Frenchness. That didn't
happen elsewhere.
BTW I looked up Brøndum-Nielsen later; it turns out _all_ Danish
dialects in their oldest form have apical /r/, which now is moribund
everywhere. Also, the Lister peninsula in Scania still has
apical /r/ unrelated to later imports from Stockholm.
Torsten