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Eric Christopherson skrev:
On Aug 14, 2006, at 11:15 AM, old_astrologer wrote:--- In romconlang@yahoogroups.com, Melroch 'Aestan <melroch@...> wrote:... even in languages where apical /r/ is normal there are isolated individuals who have exclusively uvular realizations.In England, uvular /r/ is normal in Northumberland, and there are isolated individuals throughout the country who use it. I have it myself and find the apical form very difficult, yet I still pronounce /tr/ and /dr/ as post-alveolar affricates! The strange thing is that the uvular /r/ is so rare outside Europe (and Brazil): I can only think of Inuit that has it. DavidThere are some others; check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Guttural_R .
There are many languages which have /R/ but whose speakers
do not identify it as an 'r'-sound, i.e. the thing that *is*
unique to Western Europe is the [r] > [R] sound change.
Perhaps the most well-known language which has /R/, but
where this sound is not considered a rhotic is Persian,
whose /R/ is written with the the Arabic letters Q�f or
Ghain -- Romanized _q_ or _gh_ -- and totally unrelated
both historically and synchronically to /r/ written with
Re/R� and Romanized _r_. The reason that Greenlandic uses
_r_ for its /R/ is that Greenland has been a Danish colony
for centuries, and Danish happens to have undergone the
West European [r] > [R] shift; while it's true that
Greenlandic lacks an /r/ phoneme, its /R/ is nevertheless
not to be considered a 'rhotic' apart from the accidental
influence of Danish letter-values. FWIW the 'zero onset'
of Mandarin can vary between actual zero and any of the
allophones [? h\ M\ R N]; it is historically descended
from a merger of *? *h\ and *N and has nothing to do with
historical /z`/ (Pinyin _r_) or /l/.
OTOH I see that some dialects of Bengali have an [R]
allophone of /r/ before velar consonants, sop the
rhotic association of [R] is not entirely unique to
Western Europe.
--
/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)