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

On Tue, 2 Nov 2004 13:54:06 -0500, Pascal A. Kramm <pkramm@...> wrote:

>On Mon, 1 Nov 2004 20:24:13 -0500, Sally Caves <scaves@...> wrote:
>
>>In pronouncing German, I try my
>>best to produce the back-trilled "r."  I can't do it, it comes out
>>sounding like a French "r," but I respect it and the uvular acrobatics of
>>its natives.
>
>German "r" is definitely NOT trilled. It's the voiced uvular fricative.
The only definite assertion about the pronunciation of German /r/ is that
there's a lot of variation (and I'm talking about standard German, not about
the dialects). Some varieties have [r] (which is also recommended in the
prescriptive tradition) but most have nowadays either [R\] or [R].
Independent from that, there's a variation analogous to the one between the
rhotic and non-rhotic dialects in English: Most varieties of standard German
vowelize the /r/ after long vowels or schwa, and many vowelize it after
short vowels as well.

>I'm not that good at French, but afaik, it's prectically the same there.
I thought that a real trill [R\] is most common. In Parisian speech (and
other), /r/ is devoiced in weak syllables after voiceless consonants, so
that e.g. |mettre| turns out as [mEtX]. There are no r-dropping dialects at
all, if I'm not wrong.

gry@s:
j. 'mach' wust

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