Re: Baby speech

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