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

Quoting "J. 'Mach' Wust" <j_mach_wust@...>:

> 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].
This happens to be one of the points where Duden and Siebs disagree. I suppose
there can be no stronger statement that there is no single standard
pronunciation of German /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.
It's 'vocalize'.

> >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.
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.

                                        Andreas