Re: rhotic miscellany (was: Advanced English + Babel text)

Quoting Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>:


> This is true. There is no real doubt that the Vulgar Latin /r/ was the
> lingual trill which is still retained in modern Italian.  There is no
> reason to suppose that it was any different in france. Certainly the
> change of intervocalic and, sometimes, final /r/ to /z/ in the 16th & 17th
> centuries (hence _chaire_ --> chaise, and the feminine of -eur being -euse
> and the dropping of -r so often in words ending in -er) is clear testimony
> of its linguo-dental nature. The uvular R could not have become general
> till the 18th century and did not, apparently, become general in Parisian
> speech till the beginning of the 19th century. Once it had become
> fashionable in Parisian speech it spread not only to the rest of northern
> France but also into the Netherlands and into Germany.
And, apparently, into Scandinavia - at least, that's the explanation I've heard
for the uvular realizations of /r/ common in southern Sweden. Some 'lects have
uvular /r/'s in some positions and alveolar/retroflex in others. They also
commonly totally lose /r/ in the positions where it in Standard Swedish merges
with a following dental; eg, while I pronounce /sport/ as [spOt`(:)], they
would say it as [spOt:]. (Well, there's no reason to think it's /sport/ for
them, since they pronounce _sport_ and _spott_ the same, and the later
certainly contains no /r/.)

I do not remember what happens in Danish.


                                                          Andreas