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Re: What _is_ rhoticity? (wa laterals (was: Pharingials etc))

From:Javier BF <uaxuctum@...>
Date:Saturday, February 14, 2004, 11:58
>Just a possible way out of this morass: Let us suppose that all rhotics >originally start out as tapped or trilled [r], with all the acoustics >thereof-- this seems likely on the basis of Romance (trill in Ital, Span, >dialectal trill vs. uvular in Fr., trill in Portugal vs. vl.velar fric in >Brazilian), German (dialectal trill vs. velar?/uvular), and Slavic (from >what I'm told); even in Indonesian langs. (Ml/Indo trill, dial/related >langs. vd or vl. velar fric.) etc. etc.----- so however a language's /r/
is
>realized, there is a sense that "this is underlying phonemic /r/" and the >speech organs act accordingly, producing lowered 3d formant (or whatever
it
>is that marks a "rhotic"...). Thus I suspect a language could have an >uvular _rhotic_ fricative in addition to a non-rhotic one, and there would >be no confusion because the non-rhotic one "comes from" a different place
in
>phonological/psycological space. > >A vd. velar fricative can be rhotic; but both Span. and Germ. have them
(as
>allophones of /g/) and I'm sure they're not "felt" as rhotics.
No, the thing doesn't work exactly that way. I find that all other rhotic sounds sound to me as if they were "alterations" or "corruptions" of an "ideal" alveolar trill (_the_ rhotic), e.g. the tap looks to me as if it were a "clipped-down" rhotic, the uvular trill as a "swallowed-up" rhotic, English r sounds as a "darkened" and "halfly-vowelized" rhotic (or "fully-vowelized" when in rhotic vowels), Czech r^ as a "sibilant" and "palatalized" rhotic, the bilabial trill as a "labialized" rhotic, etc. But that's not because I feel there's an underlying "rhotic" phoneme in those sounds, it's a purely aural thing: I can assure you Spanish /X/ is not thought of as any kind of "rhotic" phoneme at all, but as I pointed out, sometimes I _do_ hear it pronounced clearly as a rhotic [X`] (I can record a sample of this pronunciation for you to see what I'm talking about). Also, many pronunciations of French /R/ I hear clearly non-rhotic, even though I'm perfectly aware that phonemically they are considered r's by French speakers. I hear that sometimes they come out as actual rhotic [R`] but not infrequently the actual pronunciation comes out merely as a voiced version of a non-rhotic [X] (or even as [X] itself in the devoiced allophone). In fact, it seems that rhoticizing too much your r's is not "trendy" in current French and the more phonetically de-rhoticized, the better. The pronunciations as uvular plosive trills [R\] -let alone as alveolar ones-, where rhoticity is most prominent, are already considered substandard or 'hickish' by at least some people; I've heard of a woman who felt embarrassed of her pronunciation because her native French dialect used [R\]. It wouldn't surprise me that not too long from now the only trace of rhoticity left in standard French r lies in its etymological spelling just like in English coda r's in non-rhotic dialects. But, the clearest proof that it is not an underlying phonemicity what makes me think of a sound as "rhotic" is the example of the Haida recording: I was _expecting_ a totally non-rhotic sound, because the spelling "awáa" was clearly telling me that the phoneme there was a /w/ and not any kind of /r/, but what I heard was clearly a rhotic sound, I have no doubt at all about that, I heard the "pulsiness" of the sound with disturbing crystalline clarity: it was a voiced labiouvular trilled approximant in all its glory. So disturbingly that I thought I had clicked on the wrong place or the sound files had been swapped. It was not until I heard the other files and other recordings of Haida that I realized the weird rhotic [w`] was simply a usual allophone of Haida /w/. Cheers, Javier