Re: Chinese Dialect Question

Quoting Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>:

> En réponse à Paul Bennett :
>
>
> >On the question of different points of articulation, French distinguishes
> >between a
> >voiced uvular fricative and an alveolar trill. German has alveolar trill,
> >uvular trill,
> >uvular friactive and an asyllabic unrounded open central vowel. Norwegian
> has
> >alveolar trill and uvular trill. Welsh has a phonemic contrast between
> >voiced and
> >voiceless {r} and {rh}. Upper Sorbian has /R/ and /S_j/ for {r} and
> >{r-caron}. Lower
> >Sorbian has /R/ and /R_j/ for the same letters. Czech has two {r}s, which
> >appear to
> >be complex to describe phonetically. Pre-Soviet Latvian has /r/ and /r_j/,
> >but the
> >Post-Soviet reinstatement of /r_j/ with it's own character {r-undercomma}
> >is still up
> >for debate.
> >
> >All these examples are from Daniels & Bright "The World's Writing Systems".
>
> Well, the book is incorrect at least on one thing: French *doesn't*
> distinguish between a voiced uvular fricative and an alveolar trill. French
> *doesn't* have an alveolar trill. Otherwise how would you explain that it
> took me three months to master the Spanish alveolar trill?! What you have
> in French is a single rhotic which is a voiced uvular fricative in almost
> all accents, except a few which have an alveolar trill instead (in the
> South of France). But there's no contrast between the two: they are the
> same phoneme.
Similarly, all those German varieties are allophonic.

BTW, my attempts to master uvular rhotics to the point I can use them in
connected speech have hitherto failed, but I believe my current cold has taught
me to make a voiceless pharyngeal fricative ...

                                             Andreas

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