LL-L "Language varieties" 2004.12.07 (01) [E/F/French/German]

Tue Dec 7 17:56:21 UTC 2004

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From: ezinsser at icon.co.za <ezinsser at icon.co.za>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2004.12.06 (11)

Hi all,

Thanks Ingmar, for the lecture on the brei-R.

It might interest you that even some Sotho speakers don't trill their R's.

Perhaps it is an alternative speech type (rather than speech 'defect') and
has a genetic link, such as stuttering and lisping have.

Regards,
Elsie Zinsser

> >>>>> Uvular R is known from many languages;

---------

From: Helge Willkowei <helge.willkowei at gmx.de>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2004.12.06 (11) [A/E]

> From: Ingmar Roerdinkholder <ingmar.roerdinkholder at worldonline.nl>

[Uvular R]

> but that doesn't mean that the Huguenots, who were I think mainly from
> Southern France,
> brought it with them to S.A., they may have had trilled r in their speech,
> or both types. Same with the
> many Germans in S.A., if they came mostly from Northern Germany this could
> mean they used
> a tongue r in stead of the present "Standard" German uvular pronunciation.

I'm also not sure about how old the uvular R in German really is. Today
uvular R is the standard variety and speaking standard German with
tongue R is definitely marked as either regional (bavarian or northern)
or "foreigners' talk". But pronunciation with tongue R has been the
standard ("theatre") pronunciation for a long time, and if you listen to
old music or speech recordings, you will hear the tongue R far more
often than today. this may be due to the "theatre standard", but still
sounds odd to me when listening today, especially postvocalic tongue R,
  which (that? ;)) even in regional substandard today is mostly mute. So
my question is: did the germans who settled in South Africa already have
uvular R at all?

-helge

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From: Henno Brandsma <hennobrandsma at hetnet.nl>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2004.12.05 (07) [E/F]

Ingmar het skreaun:

OHi Henno! What a coincident, there had just been some commend
aboutFrisians not participating so much lately...

It hinget wat fan myn tiid Ã´f, meast...
It begruttet my al dat de Noard-Friezen en Sealter Friezen (at dy der
al op 'e list binne?, de lÃªsten binne seldsum) harren net faker hearre
litte.

> In Drenthe Low Saxon, as I said, speaking with a burr is called
> "breien",
> and this uvular r [R] is considered to be a speech-defect. At least,
> when I
> grew up there. My family -including me-
> moved from Gelderland (Achterhoek) to Drenthe when I was seven years
> old.
> I'm quite sure that before I myself had a uvular r too, coming from
> Winterswijk, but in Drenthe I had to switch quickly to the tongue tip
> r [r],
> to avoid being mocked on by the other children...
>
> So the same seems to be the case in Friesland? I have heard some
> people from
> Leeuwarden speaking with a burr though, but they spoke Stadsfries
> ('City
> Frisian', a Dutch dialect in Frisian mouth), not the real Frisian
> language..
Yndie.
Yn 'e stÃªden wurdt Stedfrysk praten, en de measte stÃªden hewwe yndie in
brijkjende, keel-R. dit komt faker foar, dat stÃªden in oare R hawwe as
it lÃ¢n deromhinne, dit is ek sa foar Swol en Kampen mids de Oeriselske
dialekten. Myn omke (oantroud) komt Ãºt Swol (Zwolle) en het yndie sa'n
R, mar net sa'n opfallenden ien as myn omkes Ãºt Harns (Harlingen)....
It jildt ek as in middel om jin te Ã»nderskieden fan de "boeren" Ãºt de
omkriten....
De lytsere stÃªden (as Dokkum) hewwe neffens my mear in tong r bewarre,
hoewol't dat tink allinnich mar mear jildt foar de Ã¢ldere ginneraasje.

Henno

> Ingmar
>
>> Henno B. wrote:
>>
>> Yn it Westerlauwersk Frysk wurdt dit "brijkje" neamd:
>> 'Hy brijket' en it jildt as "Ã»ngeef Frysk"

----------

From: Ingmar Roerdinkholder <ingmar.roerdinkholder at worldonline.nl>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2004.12.06 (11) [A/E]

   Ron wrote:
> Are you sure about that?  I've never in my life come across an Arabic
> dialect that realizes /r/ (written (<Ø±>) as [R].  As far as I know, it's
> always apically trilled [r] (in special singing style often a slightly
> retroflex fricative).  You are not by any chance confusing this with
another
> Arabic -- actually Semitic -- phoneme, the _ghain_ (written <Øº>), which is
> realized as a voiced uvular fricative.
> I can think of no other Jewish language that uses [R] for /r/, though
> perhaps some remnant (genuine) West Yiddish dialects may do so, perhaps
also
> dialects of Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) in [R]-dominated areas, and perhaps
also
> the now extinct Zarphatic (Judeo-French).  Certainly, no Jewish language
of
> Asia and Africa does, except Modern Hebrew.

>>>>>Ghon, I'm very sad, how can you think I wouldn't know the difference
between r and 'ghain' in Arabic?
I think you're just not completely informed about Arabic dialectology in
this case ;-]
(NB: I don't mean this offending, normally you're (too) well informed about
every subject, as we all know)

I'll give you a few quotes about uvular r in Arabic dialects that I read in
books from my own bookcase (there must be many more).

In 'Esquisse Grammaticale de l'Arabe MaghrÃ©bin' by Ph. MarÃ§ais, we read
about r:
'...il arrive que l'articulation en soit, non roulÃ©e, mais grasseyÃ©e (en
uvulaire). C'est une "maladie articuloire" du r qui semble typiquement
citadine.
Elle est propre aux parlers juifs(!!!). Elle est frÃ©quente dans les parlers
musulmans de FÃ¨s, Tlemcen, NÃ©droma, Cherchell, Djidjelli, et n'est pas rare
Ã  Tunis...'
So here we read that uvular r is even 'proper to Jewish speech' in
Judeo-Arabic dialects of Northern Africa. And that here too it is considered
to be a speech-defect.

 In 'Handbuch der arabischen Dialekte' Fischer/Jastrow, we find: ...'Im
mesopotamischen Arabisch ist schon im Mittelalter der Uebergang vor r to gh
bezeugt, der auch heute noch in den qeltu-Dialekten auf irakischem Boden
vorkommt...' And as you will know, these qeltu-dialects are mainly spoken by
Jews (and Christians) in Iraq, mostly in cities.
Qeltu means that Classical Arabic q is preserved, whereas the Muslim
population of Iraq pronounces it as hard g, like the Bedouins do.
An example: ghejel  < rajel 'Fuss'.
Same Handbuch: '...Eine gh-aehnliche Artikulation findet sich in mehrere
Stadtmundarten des Maghribs, vor allem in der Aussprache der Frauen, ohne
dass allerdings r mit gh(ain) identisch wird...'  So this means that even in
regular (Muslim) Arabic dialects an uvular r appear.

And according to 'Le Parler Arabe des Juifs de Tunis' by David Cohen, 'r
uvulaire' is a variety in the Tunis Jewish (Maghreb) Arabian dialect
(and it sounds indeed similar to ghain).

I don't think it is likely the French brought their relatively young (?)
uvular R to Middel-aged Iraq or to the Iraqi Jews, or even to the Maghreb,
where French colonial rule didn't last so long in fact. Why would these R be
 the only thing from French then that was borrowed in the Arabic of these
people, many of whom will  hardly have known any French. Another feature of
Jewish Moroccan
Arabic is the appearance of 'Ã¶' in many words where Muslims would use 'u'.
The fact that French has the same 'eu'-sound doesn't mean Judeo-Arabic took
its Ã¶ from French either, I think...

What we see here is that in Arabic dialects, like in Europe, this uvular
pronunciation of r happens to appear mainly in cities. And since the Jews
mostly live(d) in bigger cities, I don't think the thought of this r spread
also by them is so very strange. Of course I cannot prove it, but it might
be originating from (Old) Hebrew.

In cities like Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague in the Netherlands, we see
that in present days many autochtonous Dutch youngsters take over the accent
from their numerous Morroccan, Turkish and Surinamese contemporaries, or at
least some features of those accents. So in about a few hundred years people
may ask themselves why Dutch accents of the Randstad have these non-European
pronunciation. Well, because it was borrowed from a low status minority in
the early 21st century! Want I want to say, the same could have happened in
the case of the Jews...

What this has to do with Afrikaans, I don't know. But Portuguese and
'Malayo-Portuguese' have been important in the origin of Cape Dutch, and
(city) Portuguese has a very uvular r too, that even sounds like a ch [x] if
it's word-initial or double rr.
In Brasilian Portuguese this [x] became [h], so there Rio is [hiu]. I always
found that a striking parallel to Spanish j: in Spain that is [x], in Latin
America [h], just like Portuguese long r.

Ingmagh Ghoerghdinkholdegh

----------

From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Language varieties

Hi, Ingmar!

> >>>>>Ghon, I'm very sad, how can you think I wouldn't know the difference
> between r and 'ghain' in Arabic?
> I think you're just not completely informed about Arabic dialectology in
> this case ;-]

It appears to be correct to say that I was insufficiently informed, but let
it be said that I neither said nor implied that you were wrong.  I merely
said that I have never come across such Arabic dialects and that I doubt
Jewish languages influence other languages to such an extent.

However, at second thought, there could very well be cases in which Jewish
languages did have such influences, namely in areas in which Jewish
populations were particularly large and influential.  In the case of North
Africa, this may have been so in parts of Morocco and Tunesia.

Note two things: (1) Arabic in those parts has more or less strong Berber
substrates (which makes it very different from more easterly dialects), and
(2) many or most Jews there were/are Sephardic with ancestry in Spain and
Portugual who spoke or speak Ladino dialects from all over the Iberian
Pensinsula, though there were/are non-Sephardic Jews that had spoken
Judeo-Arabic all along.  As you yourself mentioned, Portuguese initial and
double /r/ is pronounced [R(:)] (as opposed to [r] in other positions).  In
many Brasilian dialects this has spread to all instances of /r/ (with
variants such as [x(:)] and [h].)  I am not sure how old this is (though it
may be quite old considering that it has been developing in Brasil), but I
could well imagine that it could have been spread from Portuguese Ladino to
urban Maghrib Arabic dialects.  (However, in contrast to what I said
earlier, I concede that this could have also been the Ladino pronunciation
of the Portuguese Sephardic refugees to Amsterdam, Hamburg and other
Protestant-dominated port cities.)  It could well be that this pronunciation
could have already developed in Southern Portugual before the Inquisition,
given that Arabic was dominant and was widely used, even preferred by many
Jews and Christian.  (Some of the best Arabic language authors were Jews and
Christians in al-Andalus/Andalusia, a rare forerunner of a great, blossoming
civilization thriving on ethnic and religious diversity and tolerance, a
powerhouse that also fuelled the fires of "Moorish" Portugual.)

So, yes, this /r/ -> [R] could indeed have spread from Jewish populations,
possibly Portuguese being the original source.

Also note that (among other countries) Iraq once had a thriving Sephardic
community (most members having emigrated to Irael and the United States).

So, yes, Ingmar, I do see your point, but I'm still skeptical with regard to
the [r] to [R] shift in Europe.  It may well be unrelated, and I really
doubt that Old Hebrew used [R] for /r/.

Note that [R] for [r] is considered a speech impediment in some languages.
I was told that this is so in Finland (at least used to be so decades ago).
I'm not sure, but I don't think this could have emanated from Swedish
dialects of Finland (which I believe not to have [R]).  So there seems to be
some "innate" relationship between [r] and [R] that the latter comes to be
used as a substitute, much like [v] can act as a substitute for [D], [f] for
[T], and [w], [u] and [o] for [L].

Helge (above) about German:

> But pronunciation with tongue R has been the
> standard ("theatre") pronunciation for a long time,

While in operatic singing it tends to be a pure [r], the stage /r/ sounds
liek a curious mixture of [r] and [R], at least among older, classically
trained actors.  This is one sound I have some trouble replicating.  I don't
even quite know how to describe it, leave alone symbolize it in IPA.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron

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