--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:
>
>
> > AFAIK Southwestern England today has retroflex r's including
> > syllable-final, and I believe Shropshire does as well.
>
> Those sites I've seen present this 'retroflex r' in initial position.
> The interesting retroflex r is the syllable-final one which produces
> the preceding vowel to be r-colored. Do you have a reference on such a
> phoneme on the British.
>
> > There may have
> > been more areas of England that were rhotic in the past, from which
> > emigrants could have gone to America.
>
> The r of which then would have to be retroflex and r-coloring to make
> your theory stick. We know there is a retroflex, r-coloring r in
> Leids, we know the Dutch colonized parts of the American East Coast
> which later became very important, and that they must have made up the
> most important non-English-speaking element there, perfectly situated
> to deliver elements to pull the incipient American language away from
> the British they had freed themselves from. What is the problem? Why
> would you rather assume influence from a non-documented and
> non-documentable assumed dialect in England than from one we know was
> actually there?
>
>
> Torsten
>
From my point of view, because I think the colonists who originated
from Britain would regard the Dutch settlers as foreigners, and
therefore would not be prone to imitating their styles of
pronunciation, particularly since most of them wouldn't be able to
speak English anyway. Also weren't the Dutch at this time a minority?
I think minority languages seldom have much influence on majority
languages, especially not on their pronunciation. I know Québec
French has absolutely no influence on the English spoken west, east,
south, or north (Nunavut) of it, and probably never has.
If you're saying that the Dutch partly assimilated and adopted English
as their language but pronounced it with their retroflex r's, and this
style of English spread throughout the U.S., I would doubt it because
I know that foreigners who come to Canada almost all eventually come
to speak Canadian-accented English (e.g. in their children's speech),
rather than Canadians adopting uvular or trilled /r/ for example.
If you're saying that the Dutch were not so much a minority and their
numbers could have had this much influence on American English, well,
I would ask why aren't Americans speaking Dutch today, or why aren't
there larger enclaves of Dutch today, since the numbers required to
have this much influence would surely leave greater remains today? I
think that to truly cause Americans to start pronouncing English /r/'s
according to the Dutch method, the Dutch would have had to become the
teachers of American settlers. And in that case wouldn't they have
taught Dutch rather than English?
I remember you once said that the Danish uvular /r/ is due to French
influence. I would ask, is the fact that /w/ became /v/ in Danish
also due to French influence? Or could Danish and French have
developed them independently, and if so why not uvular /r/?
Similarly, why couldn't American English have developed retroflex (and
bunched) /r/ independently, from the original English speakers, and
not due to foreign influence?
Andrew