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

----- Original Message -----
From: "J. 'Mach' Wust" <j_mach_wust@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Wednesday, November 03, 2004 2:37 PM
Subject: 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.
>
> ==========================================
>
> 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
>