Re: Chinese Dialect Question

Mark J. Reed wrote:

>That is an excellent point; I sit corrected on the number of rhotic
>phonemes in Spanish.  So the question remains: what languages have
>more than one rhotic phoneme?
So. Back to Daniels & Bright, this time looking at languages that use scripts other
than Roman, since my Roman script data was so obviously
flawed. This data is based on the number of letters for
rhotics and rhotic-like phonemes in a given script. Whether the
underlying phoneme structure is thus, I cannot say. It is more apparent though, from
the examples given, that we are talking phonemes and not allophones.

I suspect that in some of the cases that follow, /r`/ and
/r/ are in the original text where /r`\/ and /r\/ are meant,
but that's only a hunch.

Iberian seems to have two rhotics, romanised {r} and {r-acute}.

Malay has /r/ and /r ~ G/

Gurmukhi, Sindhi, Urdu, Kashmiri, Pashto, Kurdish and Sora have /r/ and /r`/

Pashto also has /s`/ and /z`/, I don't know if they're considered /r/-like by native
speakers.

Hindi (or more properly Devanagari) has /r/, /r`/ and /r`_h/ The latter are written with
diacritised versions of /d/ and /d_h/ (notably not /d`/ and /d`_h/). Also, there's the
syllabic rhotics /r\=/ and /r\=:/

Gujarati, Sinhalese, Kannada and Telugu have /r/, /r\=/ and /r\=:/

Malayam has /r/, /r_d/ and /r\/

Tamil, as has I think been noted, has /r/, /r`/, /4/ and /r\/

Ho has {r} and {r-underdot}, with no pronunciation given, presumably it's /r/ and /r`/

Kabardian has /R/, /R_w/ and /r/

Avar, Uzbek, Kazakh and Tajik have /R/ and /r/

Tatar and Turkmen have /g ~ R/ and /r/, although the former is probably not
considered rhotic, at a guess.

There's something going on in Carrier, and other languages which use Cree-derived
syllabaries, but it's not clearly notated in IPA exactly what that is.

My conclusion? I have none, but I think between us we've settled the issue of
single-rhotic-possession as being non-universal.




Paul

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