Re: USAGE: rhotics (was: Advanced English + Babel text)

On Wed, 3 Nov 2004 14:37:56 -0500, J. 'Mach' Wust <j_mach_wust@...> wrote:
>On Wed, 3 Nov 2004 12:11:30 -0500, Sally Caves <scaves@...> wrote:
>
>>I've never heard a uvular trill [R\] among francophones; rather, the
>>fricative [R] or the unvoiced fricative /x/, especially after "t": "trois,"
>>etc.  The uvular trills I'm familiar with occur in Hebrew (in fact I was
>>just practicing it with a group of Israelis the other night), and among
>>certain German speakers.  Many Germans, I gather, don't trill, but merely
>>fricatize the "r"; but I have a teasing friend who tells me that I sound
>>French when I pronounce German.  That may well be; my training has been
>>mostly in French and Spanish.
>
>Because of the /r/-realization? I would have said that the French accent of
>German isn't characterized by a specific realization of /r/, but rather (by
>rhythm and melody, of course) by the realization of /ç/ , /h/ and /i/.
If someone here in Germany wants to imitate a French dialect, he'll most
notably omit the initial "h" sound (e.g. turning "hotel" into "otel"), and
pronounce the German "ch" as "sh".

>Are you asking whether the change originated in Germany and England (I don't
>get the meaning of "the change came about")? I've heard that the uvular
>trill was first intoduced by French curtisanes at the court of the absolute
>kings, became fashionable among the nobles and spread more and more. German
>also had originally a trill-flap, and the uvular pronunciation is said to be
>a French import.
Yes, that could be very well possible.

>>Never got into Schweizerdeutsch... I don't even know how to spell the way
>>they pronounce it there! :(    Swizerdutsch?  And then all the variations!!
>
>|Schwyzerdütsch| and |Schwiizertütsch| may be the most common ways to write
>it, but many variations are possible (the |y| is used for /i/ as opposed to
>|i| for /I/, but not all share this use).
Most common is "Schwyzerdütsch", but I've also seen "Schwyzertütsch"
sometimes. Never with the double i, however.

--
Pascal A. Kramm, author of Choton
official Choton homepage:
http://www.choton.org

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