Re: Chinese Dialect Question

At 19:01 2.10.2003, Garth Wallace wrote:
>JS Bangs wrote:
>>Mark J. Reed sikyal:
>>
>>Furthermore, most languages have exactly one rhotic
>
>Is this a universal, or are there some languages with more than one?
Spanish distinguishes /4/ aznd /r/, and some Occitan dialects distinguish
/r/ and /R/.  Lhasa Tibetan has /r\/ and /s`/ as a voiced~voiceless oppo-
sition pair.  There may be other that I don't know of.

FWIW some Swedish have [r] and [R] as conditoned allophones.

At 19:53 2.10.2003, JS Bangs wrote:


>I don't think we can count this as "two kinds of 'r'". The distinction
>between [4] and [r] is one of length in Spanish, phonemically /r/ and
>/r:/. Their distribution attests to this--like geminates in most
>languages, they do not contrast initially or finally. And as a geminate
>/r:/ should not be considered a fully distinct phoneme. We do not say that
>a language with /k g k: g:/ has four velar stops, do we?
But these are the only non-geminate~geminate pair in Spanish!

/BP 8^)
--
B.Philip Jonsson mailto:melrochX@melroch.se (delete X)
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