> Yes, there are widely diverging pronunciations of /r/ in many
languages, and of course I know about the tap or trill
pronunciations of English /r/ in certain dialects. But do those
variations of /r/ in other languages include an alveolar/retroflex
approximant, as it is most commonly pronounced overall in English
(including North American)? Especially before vowels? (I have heard
a somewhat retroflex approximant pronunciation in Dutch speakers
when /r/ is before a consonant, but the trill or tap seems to be the
norm in most other positions). I have never heard a speaker of a
foreign language use an apical approximant /r/ before vowels, I have
only heard this in English. I still feel English is unique in this
respect.
>
In my foreign ears, the Dutch and American /r/'s are almost
identical: retroflex and precedent-vowel-coloring, wheras
English /r/ sounds more garden-variety (but then I haven't heard the
relevant northern dialects). So I proposed that the American
retroflex /r/ came from a substandard Dutch-based 17-18th c. New
York dialect, which became the language of the new immigrants to New
York, whence it spread as the standard dialect to the rest of the US
(minus New England, which drops /r/'s, and Southern, which does
likewise. Miguel objected strongly to that idea.
Torsten