Possible phonological changes (was: Rate of change)

[Eduard Selleslagh]

----- Original Message -----
From: <X99Lynx at aol.com>
Sent: Friday, June 15, 2001 7:13 AM

[snip]

>     Then he went on to point out that European Portuguese has the rolled r,
>     but (Northern) Brazilian Portuguese has an /h/ reflex of /r/, to which I
>     added that the Puerto Rican Spanish rolled ("double") rr is often
>     pronounced as a velar like in French etc.  The implication is that
>     Brazilian may have passed through this stage in the evolution of r > h.

[snip]
> Steve Long

[Ed Selleslagh]

Isn't there a little confusion here? Isn't the Brazilian Portuguese r that's
pronounced as uvular r, as [rx] in final position, or as [x] or even [h], the
original rr (cf. Spanish), the rolling r (>3 taps)? Not the single r
(originally one tap, now often more). [Note that double r is not always written
as such, as orthography is different according to position in a word, e.g.
initially or finally]. Did you mean that Puertoricans use the Brazilian
pronunciation of double r? I wasn't aware of that. Maybe Portuguese influence
stretched farther north than I thought: in Curaçao Papiamento there is a
considerable Portuguese base, but that's still far more to the south than P.R.

In the mid-southern Andes (parts of Perú, Bolivia, N. Argentina), the double
r is pronounced [Z] (French j), strongly reminescent of Polish rz or Czech
r-hacek, which - as far as I know - have the same origin (rolling r). All seem
to be results of retroflexion.

As to unusual sound correspondences, isn't there a Sumerian rustic dialect that
uses m and S instead of g and n? I seem to remember something like that from
Meillet. Can anyone tell me more about that?

Ed.