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

On Monday, November 8, 2004, at 02:06 , Sally Caves wrote:

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Ray Brown" <ray.brown@...>
[snip]

>> OOOOPS!!!!
>>
>> Looks like some of us have been writing at cross purposes - probably not
>> for the first time in this thread  :)
>>
>> I cannot answer for John, but I've been assuming that Sally was talking
>> about the |r| in |rack|, not the |r| in |car|. While I have an alveolar
>> approximant for the first, I have no consonant at all for the second!
>
> Well naturally!  You're English!  :)
Well, from south east England - not all my fellow countrymen are
non-rhotic   :)

> I was actually talking about all |r|s
> as I pronounce them, and as many do in America,
Ah, so I was only half mistaken!

>  but it seems that the way I
> put it, yesterday, only final |r| got discussed.  For me, there is tongue
> curling in all of them, but to different degrees.  I made a list of |r|s
> below as I pronounce them:
Wow - I have far less variety. Basically alveolar approximant if its
prevocalic or intervocalic, and zero or [@] if post vocalic. The only
variation is the prevocalic following an initial consonant, e.g. pr-, tr-
where there'll be some slight modification caused by the preceeding
consonant.

[snip]
>
> I toyed with the madcap idea of making a huge soundbyte of my |r|s, |r|s
> as
> I've heard them in Bucks County north Philly,  as I've heard them in
> England
> and Wales, and as our honorable California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger
> pronounces them.  :)  I'm clearly trying to escape from reading
> dissertations.
Yep - a situation I remember only too well  :)
Grit your teeth and read those dissertations - there might even be an
interesting one among them   ;)
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On Monday, November 8, 2004, at 06:06 , Roger Mills wrote:

> Ray Brown wrote:
>> I cannot answer for John, but I've been assuming that Sally was talking
>> about the |r| in |rack|, not the |r| in |car|.
>
> No, it's always been about post-vocalic r.  See the quote below...
Apparently not so - see Sally's response above. It seems that you have
also been half-mistaken  :)

[snip]
>> But as Marcos has written, and I agreed with him, this usage is confusing
>> as it is *not* the same usage as IPA point of articulation of consonants.
>> IPA charts name he feature denoted by the diacritic which CXS represents
>> thus [`] (my mailer doesn't seem to like the actual IPA symbol) as
>> 'rhotocity'.
>>
>> I suspect this is where the confusion has come into this thread. We have
>> not all been writing about the same thing or using the term 'retroflex'
>> in
>> the same way.
>
> Personally, I don't find it confusing; retroflexed can refer to a state of
> the tongue (in vowel articulations) as well as to the POA.
But I wrote 'retroflex'. I agree the r-colored vowels are 'retroflexed' -
and if we were careful to distinguish 'retroflex' and 'retroflexed' it
would not be confusing. But in practice, the two are not carefully
distinguished.

It's a bit like (Brit) English 'mince meat' & 'minced meat' - very
different things, but every so often confused by the ignorant with
humorous and/or embarrassing results.

(For those unfamiliar with the terms:
minced meat = meat that has been minced (cut up into very small pieces)
mince meat = a mixture of raisons, candied peel & usually spices & brandy
- used in the making of mince-pies round about Christmas time)

[snip]
> That may be true of those dialects; IMO it's not the case in Amer.Engl.,
> at
> least not in monosyllables like "car, ear, core" etc. Below is a quote
> from
> a long msg. I sent yesterday (Subj: "back to rhotic miscellany";
> apparently
> it reached the list since Charlie replied to it, but it has yet to come
> back
> to me. It's in the archive in the Nov. Week 1 list). In any case, I'm
> suggesting that -Vr# ~-VrC# sequences might better be viewed as diphthongs
> involving the centralized/rhotic [@^] (IPA schwa with hook)
I agree very much with this as a _phonemic_ analysis. IME my non-rhotic
fellow speakers, unless they have some knowledge of phonetics (and most do
not), are convinced they pronounce an /r/ in words like _cart_ [k_hA:t].
They seem to think the difference between the vowels in _cat_ and _cart_
is because the second has an /r/ in it, i.e. [A:] is analyzed as /ar/.
This is of course diachronically correct, tho in the case of us
non-rhotics not synchronically correct.

Certainly _here_ is IME [hi@] or [hi@`]. But there is a tendency in south
east England to make the these sounds simple low vowels. As a boy I
pronounced _paw_, _pour_ and _poor_ all the same way [p_hO:]. Now, having
lived in other parts of Britain, I say _poor_ as [pu@] (a centering
diphthong), but [p_hO:] is still common in this neck of the woods.

[snip]
> No to both questions, just speaking for self. For one thing, initial r
> usually involves a slight bit of rounding (note that children just
> beginning
> to speak often confuse onset /r/ (and /l/) with /w/).
True - and one form of speech defect causes some people to pronounce
initial /r/ like [w] (and in my part of the world, post vocalic /l/ is
nearly aways pronounced [w] in colloquial speech  :)

> Oh me, oh my, this poor bedraggled horse!!
Yes, I cannot help feeling we have practically flogged this poor horse to
death. Maybe, it's time to return to Conlanging (and Sally to her
dissertations    :)

Ray
===============================================
http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown
ray.brown@freeuk.com
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Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
which is not so much a twilight of the gods
as of the reason."      [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]