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rhotic miscellany, and a usage note

From:Roger Mills <rfmilly@...>
Date:Friday, November 5, 2004, 0:53
J. 'Mach' Wust wrote:
> > --- Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> skrev: > >> That was the /r/ used by Hitler, as you hear on > >> ancient newsreels. It may be - I don't know - that > >> this accounts for its demise in the last half > >> century. > > As I've said, I think the accent used in these ancient newsreels was just > the standard media accent of that time, for nazis as well as for > communists > or democrats. We just happen to hear more nazi newsreels than other ones > (which is sad if you think about it).
Hitler was Austrian IIRC and began his political rise in Bavaria. Is the trilled r possibly a southern feature?
>
OTOH Marlene Dietrich, almost his contemporary (and much nicer to listen to), had the uvular fric. r, often parodied by English speakers who hear it as closest to our [w]. OTTH, I'm now listening to my Lotte Lenya/Brecht/Weill CD, and she has a most amazing mixture of pronunciation: --a trilled alveolar [r] seems to predominate, especially in emphasized words, word final, in clusters like ...tr..., gr...; perhaps this is "stage German". --almost an American /r/ in final position in unstressed words like der, einer, though it's possible it's uvular and doesn't come thru the recording process well. The first word of "Cäsars Tod"-- Rom -- sounds very American. If these songs were recorded in the 50s, it may be she'd acquired a bit of an American accent after 20+ years here. ======================== I really don't like to do this, but it seems to be in vogue to correct our foreign friends' usages. J. 'Mach' Wust wrote:
>but it is remarkable that somebody
can so totally acquire a foreign language that even native speakers of the same region are cheated!> "Cheated" is not quite right, and too strong in any case-- "fooled" (not malicious) or "deceived" (possibly malicious) would be more appropriate. "Cheat" connotes deceiving with illicit or dishonest means and motives-- cheat at cards, cheat on an exam, cheat in an election (did I say that???), cheat s.o. out of his money.

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John Cowan <jcowan@...>