LL-L "Phonology" 2008.06.15 (07) [E]

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L O W L A N D S - L  - 15 June 2008 - Volume 07
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From: Paul Tatum <ptatum at blueyonder.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L "Phonology" 2008.06.15 (05) [E]

Hello Ron et al,
you wrote:

> From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com <mailto:sassisch at yahoo.com>>
>

 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/.
>

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

I sometimes think that discussing the distribution of different
pronunciations of a single sound (I don't want to say 'phoneme', because a
sound is only a phoneme within a given context) across areas is problematic.
In this case, do your theories have to explain every area of uvular or
apical pronunciation as having its origins due to the influence of some
other area? How do you distinguish between pronunciation which is
'indiginous' from pronunciation which is 'borrowed'? Is the idea that a
craze for a culture should influence the speech of common people a little
far-fetched? I mean OK, a lot of English people say 'garage' with the French
voiced fricative /Z/ for the second [g], but that is a foreign phoneme, but
replacing /r/ with /R/ in native words across the board seems, well,
implausible. Is there any evidence this has ever happened in any language?

Paul Tatum.

----------

From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
 Subject: Phonology

Hi, Paul!

It's been a while.

All good points you raised I think.

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.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron
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