Re: Dutch R

--- Danny Wier <dawier@...> wrote:
> From: "Jan van Steenbergen"
> <ijzeren_jan@...>
>
> | It is true, that at least in the Netherlands the
> [r]
> | speakers are outnumbered by the [R] speakers. In
> | Belgium, however, the overwhelming majority of
> Flemish
> | people pronounce it like [r].
> | No offense meant, but I think that the [R] is in
> many
> | cases the result of a certain lazy carelessness,
> | characteristic for the pronunciation among mostly
> | younger Dutch people of their language.
>
> I don't speak much Dutch, but I was thinking that
> the uvularization of R could
> be Franco-German influence, a product of modern
> European unification? A "lazy"
> pronunciation to me would be more like IPA's
> inverted lowercase r, the English
> rhotic.
>
> ~Danny~
That's not too crazy of an idea, as we see the uvular
"r" in a big swash across western Europe: in French,
Dutch, northern German, Danish, and even some southern
dialects of Swedish.

Perhaps it was also providing a voiced counterpart for
the /x/ phoneme, as languages tend toward symmetry
like that.

-- Levi Tooker


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