sound replacement in loans

[Geoffrey S. Nathan]

Paul Hopper wrote:
> Dear Wolfgang,
>
> If it turned out that a neighboring [r] was involved, it would add an interesting new dimension. Some years ago Geoff Nathan, of Southern Illinois University, did a study of "rhotics" in an attempt to explain why [r] develops such a wide variety of different phonetic manifestations, including things like the New York City labiodental flap, the Danish voiced uvular fricative, the Czech palatal fricative, etc. If I remember right, he concluded that the common element was that [r] is accompanied by pharyngeal constriction, and that the specific suprapharyngeal component was secondary. If this is so, there would then be no need to posit extreme retraction of the front of the tongue as being heard as pharyngeal, an explanation that I'm not comfortable with.
>
> I don't have a copy of this article, unfortunately, and my memory may not be reliable in the details.
>
> Thanks very much for the information about Caucasian Albanian.
>
> Paul
>
>  
>   
And it turns out I'm listening in on this conversation ;-) . Yes, Paul, 
you remember correctly that Vanna Condax and I gave a paper at LSA about 
five thousand years ago entitled 'It sounds like some kind of 
'r'--why?'. Alas, we never published it. We actually argued that a 
perturbation in F3 was a constant mark of 'r-ness', but we didn't carry 
it much further, and I now think that's not correct. Because shortly 
thereafter Mona Lindau published a paper on kinds of /r/:

Lindau, Mona: 1985, ‘The Story of /r/’, in V.A. Fromkin (ed.), /Phonetic 
Linguistics: Essays in Honor of Peter Ladefoged/, Academic Press, Orlando.

These days I'd say that there is a radial prototype category, with a 
central or prototypical member (defined as a perceptual ideal--see my 
paper on sonority), probably an alveolar trill, with extensions in 
various directions so that both the retroflex r-colored vowel in 'heard' 
and the uvular trill are 'kinds of /r/' without necessarily sharing any 
single feature in common. And yes, I've also heard people say that some 
West Coast Salish languages have 'five or six r's', which turn out to be 
various pharyngeals with the usual Salish set of secondary 
articulations--labialized, glottalized etc. I'm not so sure about the 
connection between pharyngeals and F3, however, and I agree with Paul 
that the retraction story is a little far-fetched.
But this is late in the semester and I'm running full-speed and dropping 
behind, so that will have to be all for now. Other references on sound 
prototypes available on request, or see my phonology article in the just 
now out Handbook of Cognitive Grammar, Oxford University Press.

Geoff



-- 
Geoffrey S. Nathan Faculty Liaison, Computing and Information Technology,

and Associate Professor of English, Linguistics Program

Phone Numbers (313) 577-1259 or (313) 577-8621

Wayne State University

Detroit, MI, 48202


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