Re: Is this a realistic phonology?

Raymond A. Brown wrote:

<snip>

> Here I agree with Tom.  The r-colored vowels so typical of American speech
> and which occur in quite a few Brit English dialects surely are vowels with
> retroflexion which has resulted from the _loss_ of the following consonant
> /r/ in an manner entirely analogous to the development of nasal vowels in
> French and other languages where the vowel has nasality after the following
> nasal consonant has fallen silent.  The ER in 'water' seems to me a
> retroflex shwa rather than the true syllabic /r/ that one finds, e.g. in
> Serbo-Croat.
>
> And indeed Sahla did say that /r/ = [R] which I take to be the uvular r.
> If it is the uvular trill, then it can certainly be syllabic in a post- or
> inter-consonantal position.
<snip>

I don't know if anyone here has ever studied Sanskrit, but in one Sanskrit
tutorial I read,
/R/ (once pronounced as in the rhoticised pronunciation of "water")  is regarded
as one
of seven primary vowels.  Their entire system of vowel classification is quite
distinct
from that of the IPA but certain makes a lot of sense.

Personally, I think of the "ur" in rhoticised "turn" /tRn/ as one vowel quite
distinct from the
"ur" in non-rhoticised (RP) "turn." /t@n/ (long, stressed schwa).