Re: Chinese Dialect Question
| From: | Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, October 1, 2003, 15:28 |
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On Tue, Sep 30, 2003 at 11:16:00PM -0700, JS Bangs wrote:
> Oh, there's more consistency than you think. Consider:
[snip]
> r is almost always a rhotic.
Not to take away from your excellent points about common
letter values, but saying "r is almost always a rhotic"
is rather tautological, since the class of "rhotics"
is pretty much defined as "the set of sounds represented by
the letter <r> in languages using the Roman alphabet". :)
Phonetically, those sounds belong to a family-resemblance
category with a variety of commonalities, but the only
real universal is the use of <r> in writing.
-Mark
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