Re: Rhoticity

>Ok. I'm looking at a possible sound change that would make all retroflex
>consonants evolve into alveolars with some sort of rhotic touch to them (is
>there such a thing as a rhotic coarticulation?); eventually I think this
>will make the vowels r-colored and perhaps even lead to an [r] segment
>creeping in. For example:
>
>*[das`] > [das_R] (using _R here for rhotic coarticulation) > [da`S_R] (now
>the vowel is rhotic) > [dars] (not sure which type of [r] here, probably a
>trill)
>
>Does that make sense? Or maybe:
>
>*[das`] > [das_R] ? [da`s_R] > [da@`s_R] > [da@s]
On a gut-intuition level, I would expect to see it go the other way;
i.e., that a /Cr/ sequence becomes retroflex, if the /r/ is produced
something like the English /r/. But this isn't based on lots of
evidence, only on the feeling that consonant clusters eventually
simplify with new clusters arising from the deletion of intervening
vowels. But I can't say right off that what you propose is
unreasonable or unnatural (whatever that means).

>Also, what is the difference anyway between /V`/ and /Vr\/ in English (with
>[V] being a generic vowel)? Simply a transcriptional preference? Are there
>languages in which /V`/ and /Vr/ are contrastive?
I think they would only be contrastive if the /r/ were not produced
as a retroflex approximant but in some other way.

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga                              Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

"Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead;
therefore we must learn both arts."           - Thomas Carlyle