Rhotic v. non-rhotic transcriptions of "foreign" vowels

[Ros' Haruo]

>From: Leanne Riding <riding at TIMETEMPLE.COM>
>To: CHINOOK at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
>Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2004 18:13:59 -0800
>
>I don't think LeJeune would have used a scheme like that, though. This
>doesn't seem like it would be useful to the American authors either.

I think if you look back into the history of American English you'll find
that the percentage both of American-English speakers who customarily drop
their postvocalic Rs and of American-English speakers who view R-dropping as
more "cultured" or otherwise normative than R-pronouncing has been falling
fairly steadily for a couple of centuries. I would guess that a combination
of the Confederate secession in the 1860s (leading to a devaluing of
R-dropping Southern prestige dialects), the westward expansion with many of
the West's "old settler" populations coming from non-R-dropping Appalachian
or other backwoods parts of the East (with largely German and Celtic
linguistic backgrounds, where R-dropping was unheard of), and the
marginalization of Boston concomitant with the rise of the New York
metropolis, all contribute to this trend, as does of course the predominance
of rhotic dialects in the US broadcast media.

Compare Herman Melville's transcriptions of names and places in his first
novel, Typee (which would now be written "Taipi", I guess): Happar; Marheyo
etc. His later South Sea fiction "Mardi" (which would be Mati or maybe
Maatii now if it were real Polynesian) is in the same vein. Melville was
raised in New York and Albany, but married into and spent years in
Massachusetts.

lilEnd

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