Re: The "u" and "v" in older written English is confvsing

On May 19, 2:01 pm, Trond Engen <trond...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
mb skreiv:

...
in whatever dia- or sociolect the change occurs it seems to be a
systematic replacement of all realizations of the phoneme.
Phone.

No, phoneme. The _phone_ (or set of related phones) [R] seems to be
replacing all older allophones of the phoneme /r/.

"Seems to be replacing" is not a sufficient condition for declaring
other sounds of a phoneme range dead.

The necessary condition that is a corollary of the very concept of
phoneme is that a sound produced for that phoneme become
unrecognizable or uninterpretable for a majority of a language's
speakers. From which we are lightyears away, even supposing that the
[R] is gaining ground (which it is not).

Additionally:

I don't know where you get your information, but it is strange.

In the case of German, wide swathes of German-speaking territory have
never encountered the [R]. See Western Switzerland, parts of Austria,
etc.

For French, the r roulé is alive and well. So much alive and well that
it is typical of a part of rural France and gets the speaker welcomed
with "Oh what a charming French accent!" (even though some of it is
available in Canada and Switzerland). Never listened to a speech by
Duclos, by the way?

Portuguese is out of the discussion because the sound seems defined by
morphophonemic alternation.

So I don't see where it would be gaining ground. On the contrary, the
dialect revival among speakers of Southern German languages seems to
have made the flap fashionable. Not saying that the spread is arrested
or reversed, but waaay too early to declare anything dead.

But I'll plead guilty to any charge for causing the obfused sidetrack
above. My explanatory skills are not up to the expectations of their
possessor.

All we need is goodwill, to discuss and agree on facts and definitions
(instead of playing gotcha!)

- *allophonie* n.f. Système de télécommunications etabli en vue de la
transmisson des saluts

I'll raise:

Allophone, n fm: Personne ou publication qui n'est pas francophone
(check on F forums)
.

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