Baby speech

So my baby's speech has a curious feature - he is apparently unable to
pronounce final /r/ (presumably [r\] or similar; American English...).
 But rather than speaking non-rhotically, he seems to feel the need to
substitute something there, because he hears us saying something, and
what he puts there is a glide [j].  For instance, "car" comes out
[koj] - why [o], I don't know.  The word "door" is [doj], which is
more understandable.  And "water", which ends in a consonantal [r\]
the way we pronounce it, he pronounces with a final [i] instead.  I
find all this fascinating, if just a tad disturbing on the
developmental front.  Has anyone heard of such substitutions before?
I guess it's live evidence of /r/'s status as a glide in rhotic
Englishes.

Oh, and  GMail has added the ability to send email as another account,
once you verify that the other account is actually you, and as part of
this identity revamp you can apparently finally leave the Reply-To:
header off completely.  I'm trying to do that with this message, so
let's see if it works.

--
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>

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