Talk:Rhotic consonant

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is part of WikiProject Phonetics, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to phonetics and descriptive phonology on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks.

Contents

[edit] Rhotics in IPA

The article says the IPA supplies a complete set of rhotic symbols but http://classweb.gmu.edu/accent/nl-ipa/czechipa.html says that the IPA provides no symbol for the Czech alveolar trill fricative "ř" - which is correct? — Hippietrail 12:48, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

It's true that, due to an incredible oversight, IPA has no convenient symbol for "ř" or, for that matter, for the similar but not identical voiced alveolar rhotic fricatives in some Latin American accents of Spanish (the Czech sound is really postalveolar). Makeshift combinations of r with IPA diacritics are used by some authors, but perhaps the simplest solution would be to accept the Czech letter as a legal IPA symbol. Piotr Gasiorowski 09:27, 6 Apr 2004 (UTC)
No, it's not an incredible oversight, but an incredible decision the IPA took several years ago. There does actually exist an individual IPA symbol for Czech ř, but they decided to drop it from their chart in the 1989 revision for who knows what lame reason. This now obsolete IPA symbol is included in the Unicode (U+027C, or 636 in decimal) and looks like a long-legged r (ɼ). On a different matter, the Czech "postalveolars" (š, ž, ř) are not like English postalveolars, but hissing-hushing sounds like some sibilants in Ubykh ([1]). Uaxuctum 17:33, 6 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I think they dropped the symbol because it was so rarely used (even in phonetic descriptions of Czech it was rarely used). The best symbol for the fricative trill of Czech is [r̝]. --Angr/tɔk tə mi 22:16, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Ever since IPA dropped that "long-legged r" in 1989, I, for one, have found the current substitute, r with an up-T subscript, particularly unsatisfactory because the fricative effect isn't really due to a raised tongue (the meaning of that diacritic). This subscript diacritic has the added disadvantage of blocking a subscript ring for voicelessness, a common variant of this fricative trill in Spanish. Actually, the more widespread Czech hacek-r was the IPA's original symbol (1912 and 1926 versions), replaced by long-legged r because of the aversion to diacritics back then. It should be pointed out that another common rhotic symbol is macron-r for the apicoalveolar trill (Spanish carro when not fricativized), extremely useful for specifying this sound when "r" is being used as broad transcription for any rhotic or for rhotics in general (likewise permitted in the IPA). This makes sense, since the trill is longer in duration than a flap/tap and the macron is still permitted for length. By adding the same macron to the IPA's retroflex r symbol (with a right-swinging tail), a retroflex tap/flap and retroflex trill can be distinguished the same way, and the hachek can be added for a fricative version of that too. So, cycling back to the first comment above, no, without such modifications and diacritics (often ad hoc), the current IPA does not provide well for rhotics, especially for linguists of languages like Spanish that show quite a few distinct variants of them. A comment on English /r/: yes, there was there a rounded (wr-) type in older English, but it's seldom pointed out that many (if not most) English speakers today round a prevocalic /r/ in general, perhaps to reinforce the weak approximant. SteveRoper (talk) 03:40, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] IPA stuff cited

"an r rotated 180° [ɹ] for the alveolar approximant, a small capital R [ʀ] for the uvular trill, and a flipped small capital R [ʁ] for the voiced uvular fricative."

I believe that kind of things should be left to the main IPA page. Anybody disagree? --logixoul 01:35, 12 September 2005 (UTC)

The main IPA page is already overloaded, and someone interested in this information will be hard-pressed to find it there, unless they read the entire page and look carefully. Here, however, it is presented all together. Why remove the information? It's not like there is some rule that there can be no overlap of information from article to article... Nohat 02:00, 12 September 2005 (UTC)
Yes, indeed there is not such rule, we have to rely on common sense. I do not agree with you, but since I've been a Wikipedian for a shorter time than you have, I suppose I ought to trust your judgement. On the other hand, the current condition of the page reflects nicely the "self-containing pages" guideline, so probably it should really be left as is. --logixoul 10:47, 12 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Defining rhotic

If rhotic consonants, or "R"-like sounds, are non-lateral liquid consonants, then why are uvular fricatives included? --Ptcamn 20:07, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

And taps or flaps, uvular trill, alveolar trill. Seriously, I second your view. I'd think in most cases those are thought of as rhotics, so it's the definitions that should definitely get some modification. 石川 (talk) 12:52, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Rhotism

Isn't rhotism supposed to be the subject on the different articulation of the letter "r", or what was the same phoneme "r", among various languages, especially languages of the same origin? Bestlyriccollection

"Rhotic" and "nonrhotic" are common terms in English linguistics for dialects that (respectively) preserved vs. deleted /r/ in a syllable coda: car rhotic [kɑɹ], nonrhotic [kɑ]. Is that what you were referring to? Rhotacism is also used in historical linguistics when another sound becomes /r/, e.g. Latin honos → honor. SteveRoper (talk) 03:51, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Why is the uvular trill grouped with the alveolar trill?

Yeah, I know, they're both trills, but acoustically the uvular trill seems more similar to the uvular fricative. FilipeS 18:16, 15 October 2006 (UTC)