Re: Chinese Dialect Question

Quoting Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@...>:

> On 2 Oct 2003 at 20:43, Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>
> > Well, the book is incorrect at least on one thing: French *doesn't*
> > distinguish between a voiced uvular fricative and an alveolar trill.
>
> Bah. Maybe it's talking about allophones, then. Some of the other examples
> talk
> more clearly about what look like separate phonemes.
>
> I do know for a fact that German has at least a trill of some kind (varying
> dialectically on point of articulation?) and the asyllabic open central
> vowel, which is
> kind of an uvular approximant, but not quite, occuring after vowels.
The vocalic variant is an non-syllabic [6], which is in completementary
distribution to the consonantal version, which is usually an uvular trill or
approximant. There are varieties with alveolar trilled "r", but they're less
common. The vocalic "r" is indeed typically found postvocalically, altho the
exact distribution varies.

In careful speech, /r/ can be a trill everywhere.

                                                 Andreas