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Henrik Theiling skrev:
Hi!! Melroch writes:
Yes, yes, I *have* to watch out which identity i use where...
... An interesting further development is found in Brazilian Portuguese where [R] > [X] > [h], with zero as the logical next step. ...That's interesting, since my own dialect shows tendencies of [X] > [h] (where there's /X/ in German, there is no /h/ in German, so no conflicts occur). So in rapid speech, I'd pronounce {brauche} as [bRaU)h@] (and {stehe} as [Ste:(j)@]). More examples: {brauchen} [bRaU)hn=] {brauch(e) ich} [bRaU)hiC]
I guess the next step is devoicing of /R/ then! :-) But do you have this change also word finally, e.g. does |doch| in isolation become [dOh]? I had the hardest time actually hearing (and reproducing) the distinction between [xt] _sagt_ and [ht] _satt_ in Icelandic. I had problems with getting [G] as such rather than as [g] too, until I realized that [R] was a more acceptable substitute: there was a French guy in the foreigners' corridor of the students' hostel who had the following phoneme to phone mappings in his Icelandic: /D/ > [z] /T/ > [s] /s/ > [S] /r/ > [Z] /-g-/ > [R] /h/ > [X] Part of the explanation surely is that Icelandic /T/ and /D/ actually are (alveolar) [s_m] and [z_m] while /s/ is [s_a], there being no /z/. I don't know how funny he sounded to natives. I quickly switched to English with him, and he used [R] for English /r\/, which suggests he had had trouble getting understood when using [R] for Icelandic /r/. Interesting also in view of that OHG Old Saxon and Old English used |h| in all positions for their single post-coronal voiceless fricative, so e.g. OHG would write ['laXan] as |lahhan|. This distribution broke down when /kx/ merged with the [X] allophone of /h/, leaving the [h] allophone as the only allophone beside a new /X/ phoneme, written with the old |ch| grapheme of /kx/. What really bugs me is why they got the idea to use |h| as a vowel length marker -- OK I know they got it from words like /stahal/ contracting to /sta:l/ but why on earth expand it so much? After all they did use vowel-doubling too. In English the [h]~[X] allophony never really broke down before [X] merged with zero or /f/ in the 16th century, although the distinction from [G]~/g/ was lost word-finally in OE, and Norman-French- influenced scribes thought they needed a special grapheme |gh| for [X].
Also Danish and South Swedish have coalescence of vowels and following [R] similar to what happened to postvocalic [r\] in some Englishes.And German also has a whole large set of /r/-diphthongs, where it is realised as [6].
True. But what does really happen to /aR/? My hemixenolect has [a:] or [6:], but I suspect that is a Berlinism if not an outright foreignism.
**Henrik
ObRomlang: does /R/ devoicing ever extend to postvocalic
phrase-final /R/ in French? I read that some French has
final devoicing of stops, but does it extend to fricatives?
I *think* I've heard my son's football buddy's French dad
say [tutalQX] for _tout alors_, but it may be my brain ad-
justing what my ears hear to sound patterns more familiar
to me as native speaker of Swedish and seminative speaker
of German.
--
/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se
"Maybe" is a strange word. When mum or dad says it
it means "yes", but when my big brothers say it it
means "no"!
(Philip Jonsson jr, age 7)