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

mb skreiv:

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.

Admittedly so -- but I'm not. Or I thought I wasn't. I'm trying to explain that speakers who produce the uvular r don't produce the alveolar and vice versa, at least not without a conscious switch of register or dialect.

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).

I don't object to this. I'm not speaking of the range of possible realizations of a phoneme within a whole language, and neither of the range understood by most speakers, but of the range used by a single speaker in a certain -- er -- mode of speech. Idiophonemic?

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).

I know all this too, and it was meant to underlie my point. The depth of my failure to communicate is ever more evident. I've heard German speakers of both types, in abundance, and French speakers of both types, not in the same abundance, but I've never heard any speaker of neither French nor German mix the two articulations. It may still be happening, though, in which case I'll be happy to be better informed.

Speaking of which ... or not ... and not necessarily asking you: I'm going with my family to Provence next month. As a broad idea, how far out of the towns do I have to go to hear people speaking what's left of the local language?

Never listened to a speech by Duclos, by the way?

No. (Checking my Petit Larousse) The Communist Leader, born in the Hautes-Pyrénées? I was seven years old when he died -- but I do seem to have a recollection of a character delivering a heavily rolled speech against Charles de Gaulle. Perhaps from a documentary on Western European communism sometime in the eighties?

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

Well, that's the troubling part of it, since it's different from the situation elsewhere.

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.

What happens if the spread is reversed? I've seen the suggestion that the Swedish belt, where the two are in complimentary distribution, is the result of a reversal. This would mean that [r] replaces [R] only in certain positions. But I don't think there's any agreement on this. To me, the fact that the r is uvular word-initially and alveolar/apical elsewhere would rather suggest that the uvular r is the new allophone. Here's a sample from this area: <http://swedia.ling.gu.se/Gotaland/Vastergotland/Oxaback/om.html>

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)

I'll be damned. Le Petit Larousse:

*allophone*, adj. et n. Se dit d'une personne dont la langue maternelle n'est pas celle de la communauté dans laquelle elle se trouve.

That's me, around here.

--
Trond Engen
- allophon
.

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