Re: Pharingials, /l/ vs. /r/ in Southeast Asia

On Fri, Feb 06, 2004 at 06:14:43AM +0000, Ray Brown wrote:

> For my part, I have no problem with the Pinyin representation of |r|.
> But 'rhotic' I find is itself a pretty vague term and people seem to use it
> fairly subjectively.
>
> On Thursday, February 5, 2004, at 04:18 PM, Javier BF wrote:
>
> [snip]
> >As you can hear, it isn't just a retroflex [z`], but has
> >also a perceptible vibratory component (-> rhoticity).
> >That is, the sound is not simply a "voiced retroflex
> >fricative", but a "voiced retroflex _rhotic_ fricative".
>
> Whatever that means. If 'rhotic' can cover the American and
> southern British /r/ as well as the apically trilled /r/ of the Welsh,
> Scots and Italians, the uvular trilled /r/ once heard in France and the
> modern French uvular approximant, it conveys a pretty wide meaning; in
> any case retroflexion itself is surely an example of so-called 'rhoticity'.
> The retroflex vowels of standard American, rural dialects of southern
> England and both rural & urban dialects of south west England are called
> rhotic often enough in YAEDTs on this list.
This observation will be of zero practical use, but I am convinced that
the qualities we interpret as rhotic (i.e. that people across cultures
are likely to experience as being like their own 'r') are precisely those
that have something in common with growling.  I think that Javier's
observation that it involves "a perceptible vibratory component" supports
this.

In other words, the various kinds of rhotic sounds, though they may
have nothing else in common, all reproduce some small fragment of a growl,
and are thus perceived as alike by some very old part of our sound-
perceptual mechanism.

Amanda

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