Re: Chinese Dialect Question

 --- Tristan McLeay wrote:
> On Thu, 2 Oct 2003, Estel Telcontar wrote:
>
> >  --- Adam Walker ha tera a:
> > > And of course Rhotic dialects of English have two
> > > rhotics in complementary distribution.
>
> Actually, no. Many English rhotic dialects of English use the same
> consonants in both cases; the principal of my high school did that
> (or
> rather, he does it but it's not my high school any more). It was
> rather
> disconcerting, to be honest, as it was an otherwise Southern BrE
> accent,
> and though his r was in the same style as mine, it had the
> distribution of
> Americans'.
>
> (Perhaps it was more disconcerting for me because my dialect in
> uncareful
> speech is happy enough to drop its schwas, without a change in the r;
> [&r\d] would only ever be heard as 'arid' because of this.)
>
> > Which two rhotics are you talking about?  Two different allophones
> of
> > "r"?
> > If we're including allophones, then what about [4], used by many
> > dialects for intervocalic "t" and "d"?  It's even in complementary
> > distribution with "r", I think:
> >
> > (note: for convenience, I'm going to use [r]/r/ for the English
> > approximant "r".)
> >
> > /bEri/   [bEri]   Barry/berry
> > /bEti/   [bE4i]   Betty (or "beddy", if such a word existed.)
>
> You seem to be confused about the meaning of 'complementary
> distribution'.
> It means that one is found only in places that the other isn't, and
> they
> are allophones of each other.
No, I understand, it was just a slip of the fingers/mind under the
influence of the preceding text.  I meant contrastive distribution.  I
meant that, if we're counting rhotics in English, we shouldn't ignore
the tap, even if it's an allophone of t/d, not of "r".  I didn't mean
to say that it was in complementary distribution with another rhotic.

> So AmE [r\] and [4] are *not* in complementary distribution, but (I
> think
> it's) [r\] and [r\`] are (the latter being found when acting as a
> vowel or
> when not before a vowel, e.g. in bird, hurry or beard).
So that's the two, eh?

[r\], [r\`], [4]

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