Re: Rating Languages

 >At 13:02 2001-09-26 +0200, taliesin the storyteller wrote:

 >The Norwegian r used to be trilled by "all", (IIRC there's an isolated
 >valley where ppl still trill it,) now it's generally a tap, and in
 >some places it's /x/, /X/, /j/, /R/... easy to pick out dialects by,
 >actually... My short r's are tapped, the long r's tend to be trilled,
 >but that's just me being damaged by conlanging I think :) (All my
 >conlangs so far have used alveolar trilled r).

In Sweden, outside Uvular country, it is a retroflex voiced fricative [z`]
thingie -- much like an English /r/ but more strident and less "bunched" --
which is spreading, ousting the older pronunciation with tap for short /r/
and trill for long /rr/.  I'm perpetrating it myself, alternating with tap,
when speaking with a Gothenburg accent, but when speaking with an Orust
accent I still trill my /r/s -- unlike most people who actually speak with
the accent and are my age or younger, since I speak as my father and
grandmother did rather than like my contemporaries.

I have no problems speaking Italian, thus, except that initial /r/s in
Italian should be trilled and I make them tapped.  I wd obviously have the
same problem if I tried to speak Spanish.

[snip]

 >Is it colored by a specific vowel? That's a Norwegian "problem", the tap
 >is colored by /e/, so you get <tretten> 13 /t_he_Xretn=/ (approx.) Still
 >working on removing that e, me.

Young Swedish females are doing something similar with all CR and CN
clusters: {två} "2" /te"vo:/, {tre} "3" /te"re:/, {klar} "clear" /ke"la:r/,
{knäpp} "nuts" /ke"nEp:/.  Very annoying...


/BP 8^)>
--
B.Philip Jonsson mailto:bpX@netg.se (delete X)
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