Re: Two seperate questions: Rhoticity/Topic-Comment

Hallo,

Steven Williams <feurieaux@...> schrieb:

> In German, the tendency was, at least in the North,
> close to France, for [r] to gradually retract
> backwards to the uvular region and become [R].
Just out of curiosity, are there other regions in Germany
besides Franconia and Bavaria where they have [r] for /r/
today? I should know it as a native speaker, but I don't.
Heh, Franz Müntefering even has got something in between [4]
and [r\`] for /r/ -- he's from the Rhineland AFAIK. But
other than that I cannot think of other regions with 'funny'
r's.

> After a while, this [R] weakened to an approximant,
> [R\], because frankly, it's a pain in the arsch to
> trill something in fast speech. This approximant
> pronunciation is valid still for r's in the onset
> position.
>
> Post-vocalically, however, it weakened further, into a
> vocalic sound fairly close to schwa (because when you
> get voiced approximants that far back in the vocal
> tract, they might as well be vowels anyways, unless
> you're speaking Arabic or Ubykh or something).
Um ... According to my Sampa references, [R] is [ʁ]ˌ i.e.
the voiced uvular fricative, while [R\] is [ʀ], i.e. the
uvular trill. In *my* dialect of German I usually have [R]
(the fricative one!) for /r/ in syllable onsets and [6],
which is [ɐ] in IPA (central open-mid vowel), in codas. I
guess [6] comes from [M\] (IPA [ɰ], the uvular approximant),
which is essentially a weakened form of [R].

Yours,
Carsten

--
"Miranayam kepauara naranoaris." (Kalvin nay Hobbes)
Tenena, Dalming 13, 2316 ya 28:16:46 pd

(Sunday, December 10, 2006 at 10:07:55 am)

Replies