R and r

[Larry Trask]

Artem Andreev writes:

> The question is: is there any language in the world which has a *phonemic*
> opposition between dental vibrant /r/ and uvular *vibrant* /R/?

Ladefoged and Maddieson, in The Sounds of the World's Languages (Blackwell,
1996) report as follows (p. 227):

...it would be necessary to examine a language which uses both apical and
uvular trills, although we are not sure that any such language now exists.
Older speakers of Eastern dialects of Occitan...may still maintain a contrast
between lingual and uvular trills, deriving from the Latin contrast of single
vs geminate <r>'s, in words such as <gari> 'cured' vs <gaRi> 'oak tree'.   We
do not know of any articulatory or acoustic measurements on such speakers'
trills.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk