rhotacism from Ray Hickey

[bwald]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Jim Rader's message on "rolled" /r/ (spelled "rr" intervocalically in
Spanish orthography) in Latin American dialectology prodded my memory on
some Bolivian Spanish I've heard where intervocalic "rr" indeed sounded a
lot like "z" to me.  In many areas of Latin America either intervocalic
rolled (NOT tapped) or final  "r" has a varying amount of local friction
accompanying the liquid articulation producing a sibilant-like sound.  When
I first heard this Bolivian z-like  intervocalic "rr", it reminded me of
the Mexico City final "r", which also (most) often has a lot of local
friction, but more "palatal"-sounding, like "zh" (even often devoiced
finally to a "sh"-like sound).  My general thought was that since Spanish
historically lost voiced lingual fricatives (by devoicing and further
shifts, no "z", "zh"), the liquid articulation was encroaching on phonetic
voiced lingual fricative territory with impunity (since there were no
previous voiced fricatives for it to threaten with merger).  The
interesting thing to me was that there doesn't seem to be any
extra-segmental conditioning involved.  That is, where palatalised "r" >
"zh/sh" (e.g., in Polish or Czech) is heavily contextually conditioned (by
an immediately preceding stop and/or following a historically palatal
vowel), the development of local friction with rolled "r" among Latin
American Spanish dialects does not show such coarticulation motivation,
and, thus, seems to be part of a paradigmatic ("unconditioned") shift among
consonants.  In contrast, the change exemplified in (Parisian) French
"chair(e)" to "chaise" does cause merger with previous -z-, but I am
unclear on how regular this change actually was, and to what extent
sociolinguistic affectation distorted its progress toward a bona fide
neogrammarian sound change.
 
Conclusion: r > z may be possible as an unconditioned change depending on
aspects of the larger consonantal system in which the original "r" was
positioned.  Degree of aperture may vary for voiced continuants (phonetic
fricatives or liquids) when it does not support a phonemic contrast.
(z > r may be less dependent on position in a consonantal system,
contributing to Campbell's impression that it is a more "natural" change.
This relates to the general issue of directionality of degree of aperture
in consonantal sound changes, "weakening", i.e., "opening", apparently
being more commonly observed than "strengthening", i.e., "closing", but
with enormous qualifications.  The qualifications may relate more to
stop/(af)fricative changes than to changes within continuants.)
 
In any case, such considerations of consonantal system type (e.g., what are
the phonetically contrastive dimensions?) have obvious implications for
reconstruction and plausibility of reconstructed systems.
 
(Oblique comment:  the Chagga dialects of Northeast Bantu, Kilimanjaro
area, have had varied unconditioned outcomes of *t, among them /d/, /r/,
/zh/ and /R/ (i.e., velar /r/).  The /zh/ variant, which varies with a
palatalised /r/ in some dialects, e.g., Moshi, Vunjo, seems to show the
closing process from an earlier and more widespread /r/ reflex of *t, where
*t > r surrounds the /zh/ reflex,, and stems from the post-alveolar
articulation of the original *t -- as preserved in most Bantu languages.
The *t > r process also occurs in various other East Bantu areas as part of
a lenition process that variously affects the voiceless stops *p, *t or *k
-- but most often *p.
In Chagga, the /R/, Machame dialect, is also clearly a further evolved form
of /r/, and in turn evolves into /h/, cf. Brazilian Portuguese, in the Siha
dialect.  The *t > d change is most eastern, e.g., Rombo dialect, and not
clearly related to the *t > r change, but is shared with the distinct
language to its east, Dabida (NB often called Taita in the literature).
The unconditioned change of a post-alveolar into a palatal /zh/ rather than
a /z/ is paralleled independently by the Bajuni change of *t > ch by a
variety of well-motivated steps which reflect the same progression as
Chagga *t > zh, but without loss of the voiceless closure component.  *t >
r starts out as a tap, but then gets rolled and eventually, in Chagga,
develops local friction on its way to zh.  The central dialects demonstrate
the progression.  Most likely the r > zh change has nothing to do with the
origin of r in *t, and is unusual, but in a less direct way the overall
directions of the consonantal shifts in East Bantu may be involved, making
r > zh more likely in this larger context than in general -- but cf. Mexico
City final r > "zh")
 
P.S.  Trask's admonition on probability of chance resemblances reminds me
of the classic probability problem:  how many people do you need in a room
before there is a more than chance
(p > .5) probability that TWO will have the same birthday?  I forgot the
answer, something around 30 (cntr. 366 possible birthdays).  The answer
says NOTHING about which date this will be.  The probability for that
remains 1 in 365 and a 1/4 (p < .003).  Koestler's fallacy is alive and
well in popular American culture in the "strange-but-true" folklore about
how many "famous" Americans were either born or died on July 4.  There are
many other variants of such folklore, e.g., Cabalistic-like algorithms
about probability of deaths in office for US presidents and such, depending
on year, their ordinal rank as presidents, the number of letters in their
names, etc etc.
I guess we all know some of the "other" great people who were born the same
day as us.
Conclusion: most people hate mathematics but love numbers.