Re: Need some help with terms: was "rhotic miscellany"

(I had exceeded my yesterday's message number, so this is already partly
answered.)

On Fri, 5 Nov 2004 12:14:53 -0500, Sally Caves <scaves@...> wrote:

>From: "Ray Brown" <ray.brown@...>
>
>> > Like our
>>> "lie/lay" confusion that is fast becoming standard, alas, in the US.
>>
>> The confusion is quite an old one in the UK. I think if prescriptivists
>> had not insisted on _lie_ (intrans.) ~ lay (trans.), _lay_ would have
>> become the norm for both long ago. My parents used only _lay_, reserving
>> _lie_ exclusively for "telling a falsehood". This seems to be common to
>> colloquial dialect over much of Britain.
>
>It's an old confusion.  In early ME, or in the transition from OE to ME, I
>believe, "lay" and "set" were established as transitive alternatives to the
>intransitives "lie" and "sit."
No, these ablaut changes must be much older. They also occur in German:
"liegen" (from older "ligen") vs. "legen" and "sitzen" vs. "setzen", also
e.g. "trinken" 'drink' vs. "tränken" (older "trenken") 'make drink' (cognate
to "drench"), "sinken" 'sink (intr.)' vs. "senken" 'sink (tr.)', "hängen"
(older "hangen") 'hang (intr.)' vs. "henken" 'hang (tr.)'.

>  But the confusion has abounded since then;
>you see it in Renaissance English and later, and the 18th-century
>grammarians made it a "rule" for standard English.  In formal writing,
>especially among my dissertationers, I insist on it, and I hope that
>doesn't stir John Cowan's sense of elitist prescriptivism. :), especially
>since even I am slipping into this tendency, but orally, never literarily.
>Because it is so prevalent, I believe the distinction will die, and "lay"
>will cover the intransitive meaning as well.  Interestingly, the same thing
>is not happening with "set" in educated writing.  This may be due to the
>fact that "lie" (sustain a prostrate or prone position) shares a meaning
>with its homonym "lie" (prevaricate), as you suggest, whereas "sit" has no
>prominent alternative meaning.
This may be helped by the many English verbs like "sink" or "hang" that
already combine an intransitive meaning as in "lie" and a transitive meaning
as in "lay".

>I still find it difficult to see much
>difference between [x] and [X].  My [X] comes out as a voiceless uvular
>trill.  If I say Bach, however, I find the fricative issuing from the soft
>palate and NOT the uvula, though, sans trill.
I also have troubles to tell [x] and [X] apart, since they're not very well
distinguished in German. I can produce them with a clear difference, making
the [X] almost trill and the [x] as close to [ç] as possible, but only in a
very artificial effort.

>What I need help with is understanding "rhotic" and especially
>"approximant."  Is rhotacized the same as rhotic?  Does rhotacized mean a
>pulling back of the tongue to form the whisper of a retroflex "r"? (whereas
>"rhotic" means "having to do with r's and their differences)?  Somebody
>else told me that my American "r" (in "American" and "car")  was probably
>an approximant, and he distinguished it from a "retroflex."  Have I
>misunderstood him? (Can't remember who it was; I'm trying to consolidate my
>responses into one big one here.) If I REALLY retroflex my "approximant" r,
>I sound like some midwesterners I know. You refer to the uvular
>"approximant" above, with [R].  What's an approximant?  A sound made where
>the point of articulation is almost reached but isn't?
That's exactly what an approximant is. Common approximants are also [w] and
[j]. I think the laterals count also as approximants. Acoustically,
approximants are not different from vowels (so [w] is the same as [u], [j]
the same as [i]). Theoretically, the difference between an approximant and a
voiced fricative is the friction, but actually, the [i] has friction
(whisper it and you'll hear a weak [ç]). English /r/ is an approximant in
almost every dialect, but it may be either an alveolar approximant [r\] or a
retroflex approximant [r\`].

"Rhoticity" (CXS [`]) is a property of other sound, which means that these
other sounds are articulated with the tongue tip pulled back. I think it
could as well be called "retroflexity", but it isn't (note that CXS uses the
same sign for rhoticity and for the marking of retroflex consonants, whereas
IPA has seperate signs for the latter!). Normally, the rhoticized sounds are
vowels, but I could imagine rhoticized consonants as well in analogy to the
pharyngalized consonants of Arabic (maybe English /pr/ could be unorthodoxly
considered [p`] as in [p`_hej] 'pray' vs. [p_hej] 'pay'). Theoretically, the
tongue tip doesn't move in a rhoticized vowel, so that a rhoticized vowel
(e.g. [A`]) is different from the sequence of a plain vowel + retroflex
approximant (e.g. [Ar\`]), though I think that practically, it's almost
impossible to distinguish between the two due to the dynamics of articulation.

"Rhotics" is the general term for all the r-sounds (including the bilabial
trill, I guess). This class is discussed, since it's made up of very
different sounds and I doubt that there's an agreement on whether this class
corresponds has a common articulatory or auditory or neurological basis.
However, this term is at least very handy when talking about the different
sounds written with |r| in the western European languages.

gry@s:
j. 'mach' wust

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