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

On Wed, 3 Nov 2004 17:06:29 +0100, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> wrote:

>Christophe used to tell us that the uvular trill is as good as dead in the
>French of France today, the uvular fricative being close to universal.
Thank you for this information, Andreas and Sally! I ignored it.

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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/.

>The history of |r| and its developments in not only France but Germany and
>England is an interesting and I think quite complex one.  Maybe somebody
>else, here, can unpack it.  As I understand it, and I may be wrong, /R/ in
>French was a fairly recent development--seventeenth/eighteenth century--and
>until then the common way to pronounce it was as a flap, as in Spanish, or
>a front trill.  I know from studying Old French that it was presumed to be
>flapped or trilled.  But the change, I have read, came about with changes
>in England and Germany, especially the dropping of final /r/ in England.
>Is this true?
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.

It's very interesting that there is a non-rhotic pronunciation in German as
well as in English, even though the two languages' most common
r-realizations are very different: with the tip of the tongue in English and
with the uvula in German. I've always thought of the German non-rhoticity to
be related to the uvular realization of the /r/, but that might be wrong.

By the way, I assume that English also had a trill-flap /r/ originally, but
is there any evidence on the time it was fricativized?

>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).

g_0ry@s:
j. 'mach' wust

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