Re: USAGE: rhoticity [was Re: The [??] attribute]

Thomas R. Wierrrrrrr, Quoting Christophe Grandsire
<christophe.grandsire@F...>:

>>But take any final |-er| from any word in some rhotic
>>dialect of English (mostly American) and you have an example
>>of a syllabic r.
>I think this is only true on the phonemic level. Phonetically,
>a final <-er> sequence is a retroflex schwa.
Here, final -er sounds the same as the vowel in "earn", "burn", "curve",
"heard" etc. But it also sounds the same as the way we say the consonant r.
Christophe called this a "syllabic r", which makes sense. I think this r
relates to the "er" sound the same way that consonant y relates to the "ee"
(i:) sound.
I try saying these:
yyyyyyyyes, rrrrrrrrright.
So: is the y consonant just a very short i-glide before the vowel? Likewise,
is the r consonant sound* just a very short "er" glide before the next
vowel?

* You know I'm referring only to one r sound. There are different versions
of r in different dialects of English.

Of course, this doesn't apply to accents that don't use the "er" sound. I
think that's what is meant by "non-rhotic", but I'm not familiar with the
term.

Nil

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