Re: Chinese Dialect Question

On Thu, Oct 02, 2003 at 10:53:20AM -0700, JS Bangs wrote:
> Mark J. Reed sikyal:
Sure, sure.  Everybody and his or her sibling pipes up with exactly
the same example, but you pick on me.  Thanks a lot, Bangs. ;-)

> > There are languages with more than one.  For instance, /4/ and /r/ are
> > distinct in Spanish (c.f. "pero" vs. "perro").
>
> 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?
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?

-Mark

Reply