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COPYRIGHT 2006 Adam Mickiewicz University
... the Natives of this Country, of the antient original Race or Families, are distinguished by a Shibboleth upon their Tongues in pronouncing the Letter R ...
(Defoe 1724-27: 232-233).
ABSTRACT
This article discusses the pronunciation of the rhotic phoneme/r/in early English. The traditional belief that the dominant pronunciation in Old and Middle English was [r] (an apical trill) is still supported by some authors, but there is growing consensus that there was a fairly wide range of /r/realisations already in early Germanic, and that the pronunciation of/r/ in Old English was about as variable as it is in present-day English. The article defends this view and goes a step further, suggesting that the modern distribution of variant rhotic pronunciations in British English reflects to some extent the distribution of very similar sounds in Old English.
1. Introduction: What makes a sound rhotic?
The notion of "rhotic" is notoriously controversial and hard to formalise. A variety of segments with diverse articulations, including those symbolised as [[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]], with or without diacritics, may be described as rhotic, though it is difficult to see what properties unify them as a natural class--if rhotics constitute such a class in the first place. To aggravate the taxonomic difficulties, there is a good deal of overlap (and of cross-linguistic ambiguity) between rhotics and other sounds. For example, the apico-alveolar tap [r], though usually regarded as a rhotic, may function as an allophone of apical stops (/t/ or /d/) in some languages (including American English), and sounds such as [[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]] may well function as rhotic "liquids" in one language but as fricatives in another. (1) There have been attempts to define rhotics in terms of shared physical correlates, but the similarity between them, while hard to deny, is frustratingly elusive. For example, while many rhotics exhibit a conspicuously lowered third formant (F3) of their acoustic spectrum, such a "dip" is not characteric of rhotics in general:
Uvular r-sounds have a high third formant, sometimes close to the fourth formant. Dental r-sounds also have a relatively high third formant, though not so high as the uvulars (Lindau 1985: 165).
Some authors flatly deny the existence of any phonetic basis for defining rhotics; that is what Lindau emphasises in her seminal article:
But there is no physical property that constitutes the essence of all rhotics (Lindau 1985: 166).
One desperate solution, in the face of such difficulties, would be a cover feature with a circular definition (in brief, a rhotic is [+rhotic]), amounting in fact to an admission of defeat. According to Lindau (1985: 167), what underlies the class of rhotics is their "phonological behaviour" and "family resemblance". Ladefoged--Maddieson (1996: 215) content themselves with a shockingly informal description of rhotics as a class of sounds unified mostly by historical connections and the choice of the letter r (or Greek [rho], or the phonemic symbol /r/) to represent them.
Wiese (2001) proposes to define rhotics in terms of phonotactic patterning, as a point on the sonority scale between laterals and glides (semivowels), but, apart from the question whether such a definition is methodologically acceptable, it is far from evident that all glides are inherently more sonorous than all rhotics; many of the latter have glide realisations such as [[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]] etc. Worse still, the universal sonority hierarchy may be at odds with the language-specific phonotactic behaviour of "glides" vs. "liquids"; in Old English, for example, /wr/ and /wl/ are permissible word-initial clusters. Oostendorp (2001) argues that rhotics have no fixed sonority value and are instead characterised by "chameleonic" adaptability: the more consonantal position a rhotic occupies, the less sonorous it is.
Perhaps, then, the relative colourlessness of rhotics is precisely what characterises them. Thus defined, they do not constitute a natural class; (2) "rhotic" is merely a cover term for minimally specified consonantal sonorants (3)--a subset of those that do not fit into the classes of nasals and laterals and so lack any manner specification. (4) That puts them on a par with typical "semivowels" (or "glides") such as [j] and [w]. The latter are distinguished by the same features as the close vowels to which they are related (i.e. [+high, +front] and [+high, +round]), while typical rhotics lack those salient combinations of features and are phonetically akin to unrounded non-front vowels such as [[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]]. (5) The old description of /r/ as littera canina 'dog's letter' (i.e. a "growling" sound) alludes at the same time to the central-vowel timbre of many rhotics and to the frequent occurrence of trills among them.
Because of their underspecification, rhotics rarely contrast with one another within the same system; I shall therefore follow the usual practice of employing /r/ as a convenient phonemic transcription if the language in question has only one "rhotic" phoneme, no matter what its realisation. It must be noted that, thanks to the articulatory diversity of "basal" sonorants, phonetic realisations of /r/ will often vary allophonically and dialectally as well as idiolectally.
2. The traditional view of early English rhotics
The apical trill [r] is commonly regarded as the prototype of the whole category. It...
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