Re: rhotic miscellany, and a usage note
| From: | Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> |
|---|
| Date: | Saturday, November 6, 2004, 19:05 |
|---|
On Friday, November 5, 2004, at 01:07 , J. 'Mach' Wust wrote:
> On Thu, 4 Nov 2004 19:52:41 -0500, Roger Mills <rfmilly@...> wrote:
[snip]
>> Hitler was Austrian IIRC and began his political rise in Bavaria. Is the
>> trilled r possibly a southern feature?
>
> I don't know how the /r/ is realized in Bavarian dialects. Hitler,
> however,
> didn't have no Bavarian in his speech. He spoke just the standard media
> accent of his time.
All the Bavarians I've met use the common uvular pronunciation. I had in
fact understood the French /R/ spread first among he southern dialects
before becoming almost universal.
======================================================================
On Saturday, November 6, 2004, at 05:50 , Thomas R. Wier wrote:
[snip]
> Really? I could swear I've heard recordings of him where he used
> the alveolar tap or trill rather than the uvular trill for <r> --
> especially in "das deutsche [rrrr]eich".
Eh?? I did not know anyone had dissented from this. I thought we all
agreed that Hitler used the alveolar or apical trill. The question was why?
It was suggested it was southern influence.
The standard media of his time was the apical trill - that's the point
Mach is surely making. It was particularly favored by actors, orators etc,
because it carries better than the uvular varieties.
One should also remember that the apical trill was (and possibly still is)
the officially prescribed German pronunciation and Hitler may well have
regarded it for that reason also as preferable to the frenchified uvular
variety.
But I am sure that Mach is right - it had nothing to do with Bavarian
dialect but was due to the standard media pronunciation of the 1920s &
1930s.
Ray
===============================================
http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown
ray.brown@freeuk.com
===============================================
Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
which is not so much a twilight of the gods
as of the reason." [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]