Re: Mutable R's

At 4:06 PM +0000 3/26/03, Jan van Steenbergen wrote:
>That is not merely a matter of phonetic environment, but also a matter of
>dialect.
>[r] is standard, but only a minority (including myself) pronounces it clearly.
Is this age-related? I still have some elderly relatives who have this
pronunciation; my mother has it as well (she's from Amsterdam).

>[R] is used by many people as an alternative for [r]. I find it as hell of a
>thing to pronounce, but many people find it more comfortable than ole plain
>[r].
I didn't hear this very often -- mostly from Belgians. But I moved in rather
restricted circles (I was a student at Tilburg University for a year), and I
didn't get a full appreciation of dialect diversity in the Netherlands, nor did
I pay a lot of attention at the time.

>[r\] exists only after a vowel and sounds a bit posh (if someone would
>pronounce it at the beginning of a word, that would sound like a grotesque
>imitation of an American accent).
I've only heard this pronunciation from Rotterdamers; is it found elsewhere in
South Holland or Zeeland (or in the rest of the country)? I had relatives who
lived on Tholen, but I don't think they had [r\] for /r/.

>[R] sounds very Southern to me.
>Another often encountered way to pronounce /r/ is a glide. This is not
>dependent on dialect, I think, but mostly on a person's style of speaking.
What kind of glide? some would maintain that /r\/ is also a glide ...

Hey, look at that! Another Dutch pronunciation thread!

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga                                               Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

"It is important not to let one's aesthetics interfere with the appreciation of
fact." - Stephen Anderson

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