R: Re: "y" and "r"

Nik wrote:

> Raymond Brown wrote:
> > I would
> > assume, and I guess most others would, that it'd be the way an educated
> > Italian speaking what most text books give as standard Italian.
>
> But there's no such standard in English.  There is such a standard if
> you're specifying British English, but American English has no such
> standard, it seems to have regional standards.  I'm not sure if
> Australian English has such a standard, but at any rate, there's
> definitely no standard for "World English".
>
Italian hasn't an established standard, as well. Besides different dialects
and languages spoken in the peninsula (the Etnologue lists about 30
different languages), there is also in the way one pronounces the national
language great difference between this and that region, or even between this
and that town within the same region. The most troublesome problem is the
realization of the infamous couplets /e/ - /E/ and /o/ - /O/.

For istance, the way Tuscanians pronounce a word should be the rule; yet the
notorious realization of the phoneme [k] as /k_h/,/x/ or /h/ or of [t] as
/t_h/ or /T/ is peculiar of the Tuscanian pronounciation, and doesn't belong
to the national language.

Then there's the sentence's intonation, by means of which every Italian
speaker can understand where is the guy he's talking to from (hey, after the
recent thread about relative clauses I seriously doubt the correctness of
this last one. Would this cacophonious 'to from' be allowed?)

Luca

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