Re: What are the Sampa representations for various |r|s?

Jonathyn Bet'nct wrote:

>
> BTW, what's the difference between, say, /r/ and [r]?
>
/r/ (note the slashes) is phonemic, that is, it represents a contrastive
sound in the phonological system of a given language.  [r] (note
sq.brackets) is the phonetic representation of a specific sound, in this
case the trilled [r] of e.g. Spanish, Italian.

English, French, German, Spanish all have an /r/ phoneme; but as you just
detailed in your msg., it is phonetically different in each of those
languages.

Phonemes to some extent are abstractions; the hypothetical Martial linguist
analyzing French, utterly unaware of its history and writing system, and
using the "Martian Phonetic Alphabet", might very well choose to use the
symbol for Uvular fricative or trill in his/her/its analysis of the Fr.
sound system.

Closer to home: some years back a Field Methods class at U.Michigan dealt
with the Ogan language, a Sumatran dialect _very_ closely related to
Malay/Indonesian. (The students were by and large unaware of that.) Anyhow,
Ogan has phonetic [x] in every case where Ml/Indo. has flap/trilled [r].
When they wrote up their phonemic analyses of the language, they proposed an
/x/ _phoneme_.  Not a wrong analysis, under the circumstances, but someone
aware of the relationships would probably call it phonemic /r/, pronounced
[x].

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