LL-L "Phonology" 2008.06.16 (02) [E]

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L O W L A N D S - L - 16 June 2008 - Volume 02
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From: Ingmar Roerdinkholder <ingmar.roerdinkholder at WORLDONLINE.NL>
Subject: LL-L "Phonology" 2008.06.15 (05) [E]

But I didn't say that the spread of uvular R was due to Jewish
transmission, only that the Jews were almost without exception uvular r
speakers in non uvular environment, such as the Pre War Netherlands,
arabic countries, Italia, Russia, Poland etc.
Isn't it a bit strange to suppose that e.g. Yiddish would be influenced
more by French pronunciation than other European languages at this point?
And supposing the fact that Maghribi Jews (Morocco, Algeria, Tunesia) also
used the uvular R is from French too?
So, why didn't the latter have [y] for [u] then, too, or [Z] for [dZ] in
Algeria, or nasal vowels?
Maybe the original Sephardic Jews from Portugal and Spain had an uvular R
too, still back from Palestine, when they went to the Maghreb. Present day
Portuguese has uvular R initially and when geminated, it almost sounds
like Spanish jota.
Btw I noticed that there is an interesting parallel between Spanish j =
[x] in Spain and [h] in Latin America, and Portuguese initial/double r [x]
in Portugal and [h] in Brasil.

Ingmar

Ingmar,

I would be surprised if the spread of uvular /r/ were due to Jewish
transmission (at least in place other than the Netherlands). How would a
largely despised minority considered "foreigner" be able to do so?

Most Ashkenazi Jews in the Netherlands arrived relatively late and came
from
German- and French-speaking parts, aside from East Europeans many of them
used uvular /r/ in Yiddish.

I believe that the leveling of /r/ and *ghayn* in North African Jewish
Arabic is due to French-inspired "affectation" in French colonies. (Most
new
North African immigrants I met in Israel tried their best to pass as
French.) Jews of Egypt (once a British colony) do not use a uvular sound
for
/r/.

The uvular articulation of /r/ in Modern Hebrew clearly belongs to strong
European adstrata.

The voiced uvular fricative is most definitely not associated with /r/ in
the Semitic languages. In pre-modern Hebrew and in Judeo-Aramaic it is the
pronunciation of "soft" *gimel* (×'), in non-Jewish Aramaic with "soft" *
gamal* (Ü"), in Arabic with *ghayn* (غ), and in Maltese it doesn't seem to
exist.

I rather think that the spread of uvular /r/ in Europe emanated from French
via the French craze in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron

----------

From: Travis Bemann <tabemann at gmail.com>
Subject: LL-L "Phonology" 2008.06.15 (07) [E]

On that note, the English dialect here in Milwaukee very commonly uses
a uvular approximant for /r/ (and sometimes a weak voiced uvular
fricative), except after coronals, where it uses a postalveolar
approximant more typical of North American English dialects. Of
course, this is not the addition of any new phonemes but rather the
wholesale replacement of the original NAE realization of /r/ in most
positions. For myself, a uvular approximant is the default rhotic
except after coronals, even though I am not sure if it is quite as
consistent amongst everyone here (as there are greatly varying levels
of General American influence here). As such is a very atypical
feature for an NAE dialect, but at the same time I have heard of the
use of uvular rhotics being encountered sporadically over a relatively
wide area of the US, which makes me think that it very likely is a
substratum feature (particularly considering the substrata present in
this area).

----------

From: Paul Finlow-Bates <wolf_thunder51 at yahoo.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L "Phonology" 2008.06.15 (07) [E]

Ron wrote:
I rather think that the spread of uvular /r/ in Europe emanated from French
via the French craze in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Elsie can probably put me sraight, but Transvalers often used to tell me
that Cape Afrikaans has its uvular /r/ because "they like to think they're
French".

Paul Finlow-Bates
----------

From: Luc Hellinckx <luc.hellinckx at gmail.com>
Subject: LL-L "Phonology"

Beste Ron,

You wrote:

> Well, how about areal features then? A linguistic feature (which can be a
> sound) spreads over a certain geographic area irrespective of boundaries
> between languages and language families. Striking examples outside Europe
> are the use of glottalized stop consonants from Alaska to Northern
> California and the affricate /tɬ/ (the affricate equivalent of Welsh "ll")
> occurring uninterruptedly in unrelated languages from Alaska to Tierra del
> Fuego, and in southeastern Asia where unrelated languages share ingressive
> labials and unreleased final stops.
>
> Areal features spread through contacts and multilingualism, including
> intermarriage.
>
> Any feature can be preserved as a part of a substratum or it can be
> introduced as a part of an adstratum, and this includes articulation.
>
> An example of feature preservation is the case of tonality in peripheral
> Bengali dialects with Tibeto-Burman substrata. Conversely, an example of
> feature loss is the absence of tones in Mandarin and Tibetan varieties that
> overlap with Altaic languages in Western China.
>
> Acquisition of features very often involves prestige, and these days much
> of that is being promoted by formal education and the mass media. People
> will switch to a different sort of articulation of a phoneme if this is
> considered desirable. How else would you explain the rapid spread of the
> uvular /r/ in the Netherlands, especially in the Randstad area, the
> "happenin' place"? How else would you explain that my mother and her
> children belonged to the vanguard group using the uvular /r/ in their place
> and social class? How else would you explain non-rhoticism replacing
> rhoticism in Southern England, as explained by "the other Paul"?
> Non-rhoticism became prestigious because it predominated among Southeastern
> England's gentry and intelligentsia. In the USA, on the other land,
> non-rhoticism in New England, New York and the Southeast is rapidly giving
> way to rhoticism, because rhoticism is nationally predominant and
> prestigious.
>
> In 17th- and 18th-century Europe outside France, many members of the gentry
> and would-be gentry were so much in love with French that many of switched
> to French as a default medium with their like-minded peers. Some of them
> even faked French accents when they spoke the actual languages of their
> areas. The then prestigious "Saxon" German dialect of Meissen had or
> acquired the uvular /r/ at the time. It caught on in other cities, such as
> Leipzig and Dresden, also in Berlin, Prussia's power center in which the
> (now extinct) local Southeastern Low Saxon dialects soon gave way to the
> types of Missingsch (= Meissenisch) we now know as "Berlinerisch". For a
> while, the rest of Northern Germany remained largely Low-Saxon-speaking in
> rural and semi-rural areas as well as in lower urban classes. In most places
> it was only the "better" social classes that were totally German-centered,
> and this includes educators, especially those in tertiary education, in part
> because academics were often hired over long distances, and German was the
> natural lingua franca in German-centered learning. As I mentioned before,
> pretty much all locally raised old people that I knew as a child in Hamburg
> still used the apical /r/, even those that could no longer speak Low Saxon
> or spoke it poorly. Those using the apical /r/ in Hamburg now are few and
> far between. All right. I may seem old to some, but I ain't /that/ old. So
> we are talking about pretty rapid spread here.
>

All with you on this one Ron. This is how the "machine" works indeed. Call
it "prestige", "social promotion", "fashion"...whatever...homo sapiens is a
primate, a copycat after all *s*. What, where and how he copies is
altogether another matter...but copy he will. Even in this day and age of
"free thinkers", "freedom"...and "free" software :-D . By the way, chaotic,
random and eccentric behavior gets copied just as well.
Not even such a bad thing in my opinion, copying is the best tribute you can
ever make to "the master" (if ever there is one)...in the light of eternity
that is.

Mind you, I know that (some) human beings can do more than this...but the
first stage is always "recognition" and "copying" I think. When that
blueprint has been made, you can try thinking out of the box...but first
there has to be a box, not the other way round :-D .

Kind greetings,

Luc Hellinckx

PS: This is probably a very "continental" point of view.
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