Re: [tied] Pronunciation of "r"

May I make mention of English "mood" "food", "hood", "good", "blood", "flood", with three different vowels, all from words which originally rhymed. What reason is there for that, and what other language has undergone a similar threefold change? Or "weak" and "steak" with originally rhyming vowels, or "break" and "leak" with originally rhyming vowels, or "great" and "threat" with originally rhyming vowels - and the list goes on. What other language has similar phenomena? Plus spellings like "ough" with its myriad pronunciations. And I think English "r" is highly atypical, as I have mentioned already, and English is also atypical among Indo-European languages in preserving /w/ in initial position. What other Indo-European language has these characteristics? Moreover the fact that it's called "English" though at least 60% of its vocabulary is French or Latin, if not more, though I am aware that languages such as Albanian and Farsi also have a high foreign content. As well its currency as the prevalent international language. I think the combination of these characteristics makes English quite unusual among modern languages.

Andrew Jarrette

david_russell_watson <liberty@...> wrote:

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Andrew Jarrette <anjarrette@...> wrote: > > There is no other language on Earth, I > believe, that has general English /r/ in non-preconsonantal or > pre-codal position (I have heard a similar /r/ in preconsonantal > position in Dutch, and Mandarin has a somewhat similar /r/ but > I think this too is only postvocalic). I deeply wonder what > possible reason there is for English being so extremely atypical > among modern languages, and why would /r/ change in a direction > opposite to that of almost every other language on the planet. > But then I think that's to be expected in a language where "long > i" is phonetically /ay/, "long e" is /i:/, and "long a" is /ey/ - > what other language that uses the Roman alphabet has such values > for the vowels? But what does the spelling system traditionally used for a language have to do with the nature of that language itself? Other languages have gone through series of vowel changes no less convoluted than those of English, the only difference being that their writing systems have been periodically updated, or else they've undergone no major sound changes in the time since they first began to be written. I've never really made any deep study of English, but in all my reading over the years I've never come across any mention of English posessing _any_ linguistically atypical features, much less of it being "extremely atypical among modern languages" as you would put it. There are several students of English on this list who will please correct me on that if I'm wrong. The only real mystery about English is why it hasn't been provided with a better writing system by now. > Now, I must learn about Nostratic - I am completely ignorant > in this field. So it is generally accepted that Arabic is > indeed related to Indo-European? No, it is not. The existence, and various reconstructions, of Proto-Nostratic stand on grounds in no way as solid as those upon which Proto-Indo-European stands. The former is an interstesting idea, while the latter is a proven fact. It isn't methodologically proper for any claims about Proto- Nostratic to influence our reconstruction of Proto-Indo- European. Sadly too, Nostratics seems to be especially attractive to "monad chasers". :^( David

Re: [tied] Pronunciation of "r" - again?