Re: rhotics

Ray Brown wrote:

> On Friday, February 6, 2004, at 10:21 AM, Andreas Johansson wrote:
>
>> Quoting Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>:
>
> [snip]
>
>>> And I completely perplexed by rhotic plosive unless by that term you
>>> mean
>>> what I
>>> call retroflex plosive (and half a century ago were often quaintly
>>> called
>>> 'cerebral
>>> stop' in texts books).
>>
>>
>> Some books seem to use the terms "rhotic" and "retroflex"
>> interchangeably
>> -
>> I've seen Swedish /r/+dental series described as "rhotic", and Am
>> Eng's V+
>> /r/
>> sequences as "retroflex vowels".
>
>
> Exactly!  However, retroflex is a more well defined term IME. For
> example,
>  I've never come across the French uvular trill, uvular voiced
> fricative &
> uvular approximant pronunciations of /r/ described as 'retroflex', tho
> they have been (and are) called 'rhotics'. Indeed, I'm finding it
> difficult to see (or hear) what the trilled [r] of Italian & Welsh has in
> common with the uvular approximant common in modern northern French,
> other
> than that both are voiceless.
>
>> 'Cerebral stop'? Explanation of origin of that term?
>
>
> 'stop' of course was the old 19th century term for what we now commonly
> call in te anglophone world a 'plosive' and the French call an
> 'occlusive'
>  (the term is also occasionally found in English). As for
> 'cerebral'......


Old 19th century?  Not to my knowledge.  I still use it, and I'm
fifteen.Plus, the use of Latin words where we have perfectly good
English words for something annoys me slightly.  Cerebral is a
translation of the Sanskrit term 'mu:rdhyana', meaning 'made in the
head', or something like that.

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