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55: R and R-like sounds - Rhoticity
🕑 Added 2021-04-15 22:38:54 +0000 UTCThe letter R is just one symbol, but it can represent a whole family of sounds. In various languages, R can be made in various places, from the tip of your tongue to the back of your throat, and in various ways, from repeatedly trilling a small fleshy part against the rest of your mouth to an almost fully open mouth that’s practically a vowel.
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about R and R-like sounds, technically known as rhotics, including English r, French r, Spanish r and rr, and more. We also talk about how the presence or absence of R is a feature that distinguishes certain accents: think Canadian vs Australian English, northern vs southern varieties of English in the UK and US, and northern vs southern varieties of Mandarin.
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Comments
This episode made me remember something I hadn't thought about in a long time. When my brother was in middle school, he learned to juggle from a series of British videos. One move is called clawing (basically you catch the ball from the top rather than the bottom). When the juggler in the video instructed the viewer, he'd say, "Now claw it," but he did the thing Lauren mentioned where non-rhotic speakers add an R that isn't really there, so it sounded like "clore it." For years my brother called that move "cloring the ball" even when my mom and I tried to correct him and say it was "clawing." He'd show us the video and say, "See? He said clore!" I knew about the pasta/paster pronunciation from my time studying abroad in England, but it never occurred to me that claw/clore was another example of the same thing!
Hi Mark - you're right! As always, we only get to cover a fraction of a topic in an episode. There's acoustic and perceptual features we didn't even get to, as well as rhotic types in other languages. I'm sure phoneticians would have a lot more to say - we just wanted to introduce people, including listeners who might never have studied phonetics, to the idea of rhoticity.
Mark Mandel
I'm a linguist myself (PhD Berkeley, studied under John Ohala among others; 12 years with Dragon Systems; now retired from UPenn) and a lifelong verbivore. I just listened to your Rhoticity podcast, and I'm puzzled about your still-unanswered question of what links together all these diverse phones that "sound like R"? Specifically, all your approaches are articulatory: how it's made rather than how it sounds. This includes your link to a, iirc, phonetic study which is based on MRI analysis, which of course reveals nothing about the *sound*. Have you looked at any acoustic studies of rhoticity? Sincerely yours, Mark A. Mandel a.k.a. Dr. Whom: Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoëpist, and Philological Busybody
I love this topic... I’m Australian and have to put on a (bad) US accent to be understood by high-rhotic people before - it’s hilarious.
When I was learning Mandarin this was one of the first things we learned... the very distinctive "r-ness" of the Beijing-area variety (even more R's than standard Mandarin). Also I sometimes wonder why r isn't considered a vowel.
