Re: [tied] English and Germanic r.

>
> Do I dare to guess you are not a native English speaker? The two

phonemes

> are not confused in English, even in the speech of people who

replace <th>

> by something else.
>
> Peter

Well. I am Norwegian. I remember when I learnt English as a Child, I
thought for a long time that the dental voised spirant was the same
as the apical trill of my own language, but i did not confuse it
with english r.

Still I think that the retroflex approximant realization of English
r is a means of distinguishing these two sounds/phonems better, and
that this perhaps fo back to proto-germanic.