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

tgpedersen <tgpedersen@...> wrote:

I don't think so. The relationship in English between native /w/ and
French /v/ was codified a long time ago, when the English nobility
decided to give up France and decided to make peace with the natives
at home. They had therefore been immunized, so to speak, by the time
the elites of Europe decided French /v/ was cool.


-- Please see my reply to Piotr Gasiorowski's answer to this comment.  But what you say seems to suggest to me that you consider the predominance of /v/ in Europe to be due to imitation of French?  It wasn't an independent phenomenon in these languages, as in Sanskrit (albeit not a fully fricative /v/), or as probably also occurred in languages like Finnish or Hungarian or Turkish (based on what I have read of these languages, the evidence suggests that their /v/'s, at least in initial position, probably came from earlier /w/)?  Are Russian and Albanian /v/ also due to imitation of French?