Re: retroflex consonants

Hello!

On 6/6/05, Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...> wrote:
> Julia "Schnecki" Simon skrev:
[some stuff about retroflex consonants in Sanskrit]

> The disambiguation trick is to call those of India 'Indic'
> and those of America 'Amerindian'
Thank you, I'll try to remember that next time. :-)

[snip some more]

> All in all assimilation of dentals to a neighboring /r/ is
> the most common source of retroflexes.  It happens in
> Swedish and Norwegian where |rt rd rn rs rl| are realized
> as retroflexes (except in those dialects that have uvular
> /R/), and something like that happened in Old Chinese.
> In the history of Tibetan *any* stop + /r/ became a
> retroflex stop, so that e.g. what is written |khrang| is
> pronounced [t`ha:~]!
<slaps forehead> Of course! Swedish! I remember giving retroflexes as
one of my reasons back when I started learning Swedish ("But they
have *retroflexes*! So it's not just another Germanic language, of
which I already know a few, but something strange and wondrous and
exotic, and well worth my time!"). In the meantime, however, they've
slipped my mind almost completely, since we don't do retroflexes in
the local dialects here in southern Finland. (We don't do uvular /R/s
either, so we must be a rare exception in the Swedish-speaking world,
with our apical /r/ or /*/ and complete lack of retroflexes...)

Regards,
Julia
(proudly speaking the same dialect as the Moomins in the animated
 cartoon ;)

--
   Julia Simon (Schnecki) -- Sprachen-Freak vom Dienst
_@"  schnecki AT iki DOT fi / helicula AT gmail DOT com  "@_
si hortum in bybliotheca habes, deerit nihil
                                        (M. Tullius Cicero)

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