Re: YAEPT: apparently bizarre 'A's (was Re: YEAPT: f/T (was Re: Other Vulgar Lat

On 2/22/06, caeruleancentaur <caeruleancentaur@...> wrote:
> If my [r] is /3/, doesn't that make me a rhotic American?  My [r] is
> still there. I am under the impression that non-rhotic means no
> sound where there is an [r], as in /hA:t/.  If the pronunciation
> is /hA:rt/ or /hA:3t/ or /hA:4t/ or even /hA:Rt/, then the speaker
> is rhotic.
1. When talking about your personal realization of the English rhotic,
it would be standard to use /r/ and [3] (or [r\] or [4] or whatever).
/../ is the underling phoneme, [..] is that phoneme's phonetic
realization in a particular 'lect.

2. The sound [3] is not a rhotic sound; it's a schwa-like vowel sound
with no rhotic qualities whatsoever.    If you pronounce my name
[ma3k], then you are putting two vowels and no R into it.

It's true that those rhotic speakers who distinguish between [@] and
[3] tend to have [3] before the final /r/ in words like "teacher", but
that's just the vowel before the /r/, not the /r/ itself.  It's not
[titS3] - that's a non-rhotic pronunciation.  It's titS3`r\] or
something similar.  The 3 is rhoticized (or rhotacized, I forget which
is which) and followed by the actual R-sound (which is probably
something like [r\] in American).

So one possible realization of /@r/ is [3`r\].  Another is [@`r\].
Still another, which is what I have in my version of GAE, is [r\=]:
straight to the growling r, with no preceding vowel, like in "Grrrrr."
 Bare [3] is one of the non-rhotic possibilities, as is [@].

> I realize, in investigating this, that I don't see a difference
> between /r/ and /3/.  Do I assume correctly that /r/ is consonantal
> <red> and /3/ is vocalic <nurse>.
Nope, see above.  To indicate a vocalic r sound, just mark the
consonant with the "syllabic" diacritic.  In CXS, that's the equal
sign.

> And I've long wondered how [r] has come to be the grapheme for such
> variant phonemes as /r(or 4)/,  /r\/, and /R/.
Because all of those sounds are the diachronic outcome of a sound
which started out as [4] or [r] - and the relationship between those
two is easily perceived; [r] is basically [4] over and over again
really fast.

--
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>