Re: Franco-Provençal

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:

>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister <gabaroo6958@> wrote:
>
> > --- On Wed, 2/18/09, Francesco Brighenti <frabrig@> wrote:
> >
> > . . .
> > >
> > > 1) Does the fact that, just to make an instance, many Irish,
> > > Germans and so forth were among the early colonizers of the east
> > > coast of the present U.S.A. have any bearing on the process of
> > > formation of the different varieties of English spoken in the
> > > U.S.A. today?
> >
> > Definitely, American English probably kept final /r/ dues to the
> > large Scots and Irish presence, as well as the Germans, who tended
> > to learn prescriptive English at school --hence Midwestern English
> > as the US standard
>
> Try listening to the retroflex /r/ of this sample of Leids (from
> Leyden) dialect, eg in 'woord' at 0:10.
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbuJpyfEqFw
> To my ear, that /r/ is closer to the Standard American /r/ than
> anything I've heard in Scots.
>
>
> Torsten
>

That clip, "Leids voor beginners", is meant as humor, is it not? I
found it very amusing. But yes, their /r/ is stunningly similar,
almost identical, to American /r/, and it seems in all positions, not
just final or before consonants like the pronunciation among most
Dutch speakers I've heard (e.g. Mirren's "worden" with the long
schwa). Nevertheless, because similar [r]'s can be found throughout
England, I would doubt that the Dutch are definitively the cause of
the American pronunciation of /r/. BTW, many linguists say that the
commonest [r] in the U.S.A. is not actually retroflex [r] but what
they call "bunched /r/", whose articulation I'm not really sure of but
I think involves contracting the tongue into an arch, pointing the tip
downward, and articulating the approximant somewhere close to the hard
palate. Nevertheless the Leids /r/ is indistinguishable to me.

Andrew