Re: Dutch R

Danny Wier 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? ...>
That could well be true.  It occurred to me, too, that Flemish speakers may
prefer the [r] precisely to set themselves apart from all those French
speakers.???

And Levi Tooker wrote:
>Perhaps it was also providing a voiced counterpart for
the /x/ phoneme, as languages tend toward symmetry
like that.>
Just out of curiosity, is there any correlation in Holland between areas
where "g" is pronounced as voiced velar fric.  vs. areas where it's
voiceless, and areas where "r" is uvular vs. those where it's trilled?

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