Talk:Rhoticity in English/Archive 1

message: Could someone please replace the sampa with proper IPA pronunciations. Thanks.
:Done. --Evice 04:44, Dec 21, 2004 (UTC)
;Areas with non-rhotic accents include...the southeastern United States.
:Should this be "northeastern"?
::The deep south's prestige/lowcountry dialects are non-rhotic.  Think of a caricature plantation owner saying "Aftuh the waah" or "in Vuh-gin-ya".  Some northeastern accents are nonrhotic too, and should be mentioned. Ben 16:30, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  IPA 

message: If you are going to use IPA transcriptions for English words in this article, do not use the [r] symbol.  That is a trill consonant, not the symbol used for English R, which is a turned [ɹ]. Denelson83 04:42, 11 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Strictly speaking, you're right. However, the use of the symbol [r] for the English R-sound is extremely widespread, even among respected phoneticians. Kenyon and Knott, Alfred C. Gimson, John C. Wells, and Peter Ladefoged all use [r] in their transcriptions of English. By all means use  in your own writing if you wish, but insisting on it from others is hopeless and editing pages only to make that change is pedantic. --Angr/ 14:02, 27 July 2005 (UTC)

text: If it's appearing as a question mark for you, there's a problem with your display. Maybe you don't have a font installed that includes IPA characters, or maybe you're using Internet Explorer instead of a real browser. The character is supposed to be displaying as an upside-down r, which is the phonetic symbol for the English r-sound. Angr (talk) 19:21, 8 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: [ɹ] versus [r]

message: I see that Charleston is circled, but Savannah is not. Surely this is a mistake. The Savannah and Charleston accent among some whites is identical (I am a Savannah native). Older whites generally *do* drop the r at the end of a word in the typical non-rhotic fassion. It's generally considered the "old southern" dialect of Savannah-southern-english. 
I assume that Savannah and Charleston became non-rhotic because they are both sea ports which traded heavily with the british right up until the end of the civil war (the cotton industry here was massive then). However, lately it seems both cities have merged in with the more general southern accent. --TheNationalist 13:40, 8 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: You're right. I'm the one who made that map, based on a map at http://www.ling.upenn.edu/phonoatlas/Atlas_chapters/Ch7/Ch7.html but now that I look again I see I made a mistake: the original map actually shows more r-dropping in Savannah than in Charleston. I should have made that little circle around Savannah instead. --Angr/ 15:33, 8 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  About the image in the article 

message: People in Wales have a rhotic accent?  Since when?  Gerry Lynch 12:56, 12 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The historian Gwyn Williams certainly used to roll his Rs. I remember seeing him narrate a TV series and his fondness for the word "ruptures". Grant65 | Talk 13:16, 12 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Did he roll both R's in the word "ruptures" or only the first one? --Angr (t·c) 13:22, 12 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Both as I recall. Grant65 | Talk 23:31, 12 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Most Welsh people certainly do not roll their terminal 'r'.  Gerry Lynch 15:54, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

text:  In North East Wales the dialect is fairly close to a Liverpool dialect and not rhotic.  In mid, North West and West Wales the dialect is equally non-rhotic, and the dialect in Pembrokeshire 'Little England beyond Wales' it's dead strange.  Listen to some of the radio and TV clips available on BBC Wales  to get a feel for the dialect - these are heavily dominated by South Walian accents.  Gerry Lynch 19:36, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

text: Welsh speakers especially have strong "r"s. The strongest terminal "r"s I have heard (and I am a Scot by the way) in English were by natives of Anglesey. True, a lot of North Wales is becoming a quasi-Scouse mush, as far as accents go - due to both migration and fashion, but the native Welsh accents I can recall were all rhotic. And by the way, it isn't necessarily "rolling the terminal 'r'", it's pronouncing it. RP drops terminal "r"s just as Cockneys drop their "h"s - but because it's a prestige dialect, this isn't often pointed out. --MacRusgail 19:08, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

text: In South Wales they certainly say "cah" (Theh's a seat resehved foh booze by the boys from Abercahn).  Obviously, not all rhotic accents roll - coming from Belfast I certainly pronounce my rs but never roll them - the same goes for much of rural Southern England and Barbados.  Gerry Lynch 16:51, 26 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Rhotic Wales? 

message: know this stuff yall. know it. Ish (shoot some)  06:28, 21 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks, though that list is more about the Weak vowel merger. --Angr (t·c) 07:06, 21 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  yo 

message: "Rhotic speakers pronounce written "r" in all positions (although many rhotic speakers omit it in French loan words where "r" is silent, such as dossier)" -- so that means that "dossier" has an /r/ in its underlying representation which is deleted by all speakers? I don't think that is correct. I don't think there is an /r/ in its underlying representation... even in French Qaaa 01:27, 12 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: No, it just means dossier has a written r that isn't pronounced even in non-rhotic accents. Of course there's no underlying /r/ phoneme in it. I agree it's kind of a confusing thing to say, though. --Angr (tɔk) 08:22, 12 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  dossier has /r/ deletion ? 

message: Does anyone have experiences of hypercorrection in other accents? I can cite many examples of 'rhotic hypercorrection' in some Irish-English accents, and I can dimly remember certain Scots being afflicted by the same phenomenon.
For example, my Belfast-born father regularly sweeps the hearth with a brursh (?IPA: ). Similarly, when I was a boy, and until I'd seen the word written down, I believed that the Doctor's biomechanical enemy to be a darlek (?IPA: ). 
I'm sure that many RP actors, when adopting Mummerset accents, also affect 'rhotic hypercorrection'; can any comrades out there supply citations?
Right: what's happening here? My browser is showing hollow squares again. What happened to the words [b][r][U028c][U0279][U0283] and [d][U0251][U0279][l][U026a][k]? --die Baumfabrik 18:22, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Flippin' Brilliant; Internet Explorer 6.0 renders the offical Unicode IPA characters as little hollow squares, while FireFox 1.5 renders them properly. I should have known! Well, better get used to some new keyboard shortcuts, then... --die Baumfabrik 18:50, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: You gotta use the IPA template for them to show up properly in IE. Just type  after the sections you write in IPA. (I used to think they were "Darleks" too.) --Angr (tɔk) 19:16, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Well Done, Angr! I trawled the help pages fruitlessly for just piece of advice; thank you for making the appropriate corrections on my behalf. It's a pity, however, that IE6.0 doesn't render the characters in the symbol table at the bottom of the edit page. --die Baumfabrik 20:04, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: What's really a pity is that one of the most widely used browsers available is substandard. --Angr (tɔk) 20:25, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Hypercorrection 

message: ...is amusing. When I think of "English liquids" I think of soid'errr or biht'err. History of liquid phonemes in the English language or something like that would be better. Grant65 | Talk 02:56, 5 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, to non-linguists maybe. When you're accustomed to talking about liquids to mean r- and l-sounds, you don't even think of other possible meanings anymore. Angr/talk 11:56, 5 March 2006 (UTC)

text: If I have a gripe against the new title, it's that it's long-winded. I don't like long titles on Wikipedia, for the simple reason you have to remember exactly what they were! --MacRusgail 18:27, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: The new title

message: While the English word juggernaut may be attested from the 1630s, the existence of a language known as "Hindi" most certainly is not. Anyway, the source word "Jagannath" is pure Sanskrit, and in the early 17th century the English were more likely to have encountered it through Gujarati or Bengali than through any of the dialects which contributed to the modern Hindi language. A more specific translation is "Protector of the World." More likely, though, is that it was absorbed through Portugese or Dutch or perhaps French, thus complicating this theory of vowel changes. Either way, the Sanskrit (and Indic) vowel is much more of an open "a" than a schwa, and besides, how does the addition of an "r" sound to a word without one indicate the practice of dropping them when not followed by a vowel sound?
:I think the point is no one would spell /ə/ er unless they spoke a non-rhotic dialect. The implication is that if rhotic speakers had colonized India, the word would probably be spelled jugganaut. Angr (talk • contribs) 13:58, 22 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I believe the first 2 vowels in jagannath are both identical schwas. Short "a" in most Indic languages becomes a more  open sound only when stressed - it is a schwa otherwise. Also "jagannath" is not Sanskrit because the Sanskrit is "jagannatha". Dropping the final schwa (only in speech, never in writing) is a characteristic of modern North-Indian languages. --Grammatical error 20:51, 10 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Juggernaut

message: I don't like the way all the separate phonemic merger articles have been merged into a few omnibus articles.  Some of the old articles were quite short, but so what?  Some have since been expanded, rendering the current articles quite bulky.  I don't see what has been gained, as they haven't been rewritten into a chronological order, or melded in any other thematic way; they're just separate essentially unrelated sections clumped one after the other.  We already have Phonological history of the English language with links to the relevant mergers; what is gained by having those linking to subsections of a big page rather than to separate pages?  In the current case, it creates the ridiculous situation of having "L-vocalization in other languages" as a subsection of "History of liquid phonemes in the English language".  Yuk! jnestorius(talk) 14:15, 26 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'd agree with deleting the "L-vocalisation in other languages" or moving in to another/new article.  Gerry Lynch 16:53, 26 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, it should be split. It is a contrived merger that violates the principle of least surprise. Ardric47 02:54, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

text: I would much rather separate L-vocalisation in toto from Rhotic/nonrhotic.  L-vocalisation in English has more in common with L-vocalisation in other languages than it does with rhotic-ness in English.  That is the contrived merger; before it was made there was nothing surprising about the L-voc article. jnestorius(talk) 08:31, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree that redirecting "L-vocalization" here is a perfect example of "English-speaking Point Of View". An article discussing the linguistic phenomenon should be recreated, and then link to the appropriate section here for discussion of the phenomenon in English specifically. Circeus 00:39, 8 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree, this is absurd. There should be a separate article on L-vocalization. --85.187.44.131 15:57, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

text: Makes sense to me.  I never liked merging those pages either.--JHJ 21:13, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

text: I also agree with Angr. jnestorius(talk) 07:56, 13 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm either way on this. We should either merge the pages here and redirect rhotic and nonrhotic accents and l-vocalization here, or delete this, but we should have this as a duplicate of the other two articles. Voortle 16:57, 14 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree with Angr. Also, the thing about rhotic and nonrhotic accents isn't really a matter of "history". A meaningful article about the "history of English liquid phonemes" could be written - but most of it should deal with their influences on the surrounding vowels in Anglo-Saxon and Middle English, with only a brief reference to non-rhoticity and L-vocalisation in the end. The article as it stands now might as well disappear altogether. --85.187.44.131 22:17, 17 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Merged pages: a bad idea

message: I've noticed, particuarly with the Boston accent, that while the R is not pronounced in words like "car," which do end in R, it is pronounced in words like "idea" (becomes "ideer") and "law" (becomes "lar"), which don't.
:Do you mean word-finally, or before a vowel? Many speakers of British English use so-called intrusive Rs before vowels: "The ideer is", because of a confusion with words that do end in R, which shows only before a vowel, too ("here is the cah" vs "the car is"). The other possibility would be that some Bostoners are trying to speak General American, pronouncing all the Rs, and are doing a kind of hypercorrection. --85.187.44.131 22:29, 17 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  trading R's... 

message: could 'worcester' (and worcestershire) be added to this?  In the UK, the first 'r' is not pronounced ('wuster'), whereas many Americans say 'war-cester'.
please add if suitable, i'm not sure. Saccerzd 20:15, 19 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I've heard many people say wur chester for worcester. Voortle 14:47, 20 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: No, I don't think this has anything to do with accent.  It's just that Americans are generally unfamiliar with "Worcester" and so try to prounounce it "the way it's spelled".--Pharos 00:00, 22 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Worcester