Re: Phonology

Kou wrote:
>>you wrote:
>>
>>>The most important sound you'll have to master if you don't want to
>>>have "ENGLISH" written all over you language is an alternative to
>>>the English retroflex "r" (/r\`/ in X-SAMPA).  The Spanish-style
>>>alveolar trill or tap /r/ is the most common, though the French-style
>>  >uvular /R/ would be even more un-English.  =)
>
>Géarthnuns offers both, with "r" as the Mom's apple pie trill, and
>"rh" as what I've described as a very breathy Parisian "r" (unvoiced,
>as in "battre"). I thought maybe Dutch "gr" might come close, but I
>don't have a native Dutch speaker around to verify if this is the
>sound I'm trying to describe. Suffice it to say that there are two
>Géarthnuns "r's" and they are phonemically distinct.
>
Then the "rh" would apparently be a voiceless uvular fricative???  But the
question is, are these truly two rhotics, or would /r/ be considered a
resonant (like w j l) while /rh/ is a member of the fricative class (along
with f, s, S, etc.).  It's a matter of how the language is analyzed and
where these two sounds fit into the system.   In distinctive feature terms,
admittedly a little outmoded nowadays, the resonants form a "natural class"
tending to behave similarly,  and they  can be distinguished by their
various plus or minus marks, while fricatives, along with stops, form
another natural class, "true consonants" for short, and tend to behave
differently from resonants. (Hope this is clear-- it's been a while since I
really worked with distinctive feature phonology.)

BTW I tend to disagree with the original post-- while the Amurrcan /r/ is
indeed widely heard (simply because Amer. Engl is all over the place), in
phonological terms our /r/ is said to be quite rare in languages of the
world. It's really quite an exotic sound.......:-)  Trilled or tapped /r/ is
far more common.