From: tgpedersen
Message: 39143
Date: 2005-07-09
> At 7:54:43 on Friday, 8 July 2005, Carl Hult wrote:In all apical-r using communities, there are some using dorsal /r/.
>
> > When studying ancient texts, have any of you or your
> > predecessors taken into account the following:
>
> > 1) Speech is changed by influence from the upper classes,
> > such as speech impediments which has been proven to change
> > the way folks speak. The "thick" R, the tongue root-R as
> > we call it in swedish, is such an evolution which
> > originated in a speech problem.
>
> I don't believe that there is any evidence for this. See
> the Linguist List discussion at
> <http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/11/11-2186.html>.
>
> > 2) They may have spelled a certain word wrong.
>
> It's not very meaningful to talk about spelling a word wrong
> unless the written culture in question has the notion of
> standardized spelling. Until very recently most did not; a
> person might spell the same word in different ways in the
> same document without anyone considering it an error.
>