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Re: Baby speech

From:Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>
Date:Thursday, December 1, 2005, 20:15
Quoting "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...>:

> 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.
In stereotypical little kid's speak here, /r/ gets realized as [j] or [j\] - eg. _jag orkar inte längre_ becomes [jA: Ujkaj IntE lENjE]. So, I've been aware of substitutions of the kind for as long as I can remember. Unfortunately, I don't therefore have any interesting insights about it to share, tho I can note that I don't think it would make much sense to treat /r/ as a glide in Swedish.
> 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.
It works. Andreas