South American /r/ & [h]

[Roger Wright]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
 
 
And in Brazilian Portuguese, the phoneme /r/ (or, at least, the one
written with the letter "r") is usually [h] (or [x]). A secondary
articulation, I suppose; Lisbon has an aspirated sort of [rh] or
[hr]; further East, nearer the Spanish border, it doesn't.
                                        RW
 
 
On Wed, 28 Oct 1998, Jim Rader wrote:
 
>----------------------------Original message----------------------------
>Another unexotic example of assibilation of a rhotic sound can be
>found in several varieties of New World Spanish, where orthographic
><rr>, the lengthened trill, becomes a voiced palato-alveolar
>fricative in certain positions.  I recall being struck by this in the
>speech of an instructor from Co/rdoba, in the interior of Argentina,
>at a time when I knew nothing about the phonetics of Spanish.