Re: Need some help with terms: was "rhotic miscellany"

On Friday, November 5, 2004, at 06:49 , Roger Mills wrote:

> Sally Caves wrote:
>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Ray Brown" <ray.brown@...>
[snip]
>>>>> The symbol ` is used to show rhotacized or r-colored vowels: [a`],
>>>>> [@`],
>>>>> [i`] etc.
>
> I'm not sure "rhotacized" and "r-colored" are synonyms.....but could be
> wrong.  I've always thought "rhotacize ~rhotacism" referred to the change
> of
> some sound to [r], as in Latin and Germanic intervocalic s > r.
That indeed is the the more common meaning of the word.

The vowels in words like _car_ and _cart_ in the common American
pronunciation are described as rhotic and are said to possess 'rhoticity'.
I suppose in theory one should say that such vowels are "rhoticized", but
the term "rhotacized" is also found. For example, David Crystal in "A
Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics" writes, under the heading
_retroflex_:
"...the vowel is said to be 'r-coloured_' or 'rhotacized'...."


>> What I need help with is understanding "rhotic" and especially
>> "approximant."  Is rhotacized the same as rhotic?
>
> I don't think so. See above re rhotacized; rhotic seems to mean 1.
> "r-like",
> and 2. a class of sounds ([r, r\, R] et al.) that cause specific changes
> in
> the formants of a preceding vowel.
Yes, it's not easily definable. On the 6th Feb. this year, Dirk Elzinga
wrote to the Conlang list:
"a lowered third formant is the cue for rhotacization. A lowered second
formant is the cue for backness (more
precisely, it's the difference between the second and first formant)."

Um, thinks: maybe 'rhoticity' would be a better term than 'rhotacization'.
However, when I asked Dirk to explain, he wrote back (and as it can read
in the archives, I guess Dirk won't object to my quoting it here):
"Okay, I'll try. Any body of air (such as that enclosed by a bottle or
the mouth) will vibrate in a way which depends on its size and shape.
This vibration produces pitches at certain frequency ranges; these
frequencies are entirely dependent on the size and shape of the
resonating chamber and not on the fundamental frequency (note that
vowel quality remains constant even when the pitch changes).

"During the production of vowels, we alter the size and shape of the
mouth and the corresponding resonant frequencies; this gives vowels
their particular acoustic profiles. There are two frequency regions
which are essential to the recognition of vowels: the lower one is
called the first formant and the higher one is the second formant. For
English vowels, the first formant varies from about 250 Hz to 700 Hz;
the second formant can vary from about 2900 Hz to 2200 Hz. There are
formant bands above these two, but they become decreasingly important
to speech perception. Rhoticity is defined as a lowering of the
frequency of the third formant band.

"As I understand it, rhoticity is marked only by a lowered third
formant. Since there are a number of articulatory maneuvers which will
achieve this acoustic/perceptual target, I believe that the acoustic
property of a lowered third formant is definitional for rhoticity."

This definition applies, so I understand, both to 'rhotic vowels' and to
the various seemingly disparate consonants commonly termed 'rhotic'.

>   Does rhotacized mean a
>> pulling back of the tongue to form the whisper of a retroflex "r"?
>
> I think that's simply "retroflexion".
Yes it is. The term retroflex is applied to those consonants made when the
tip of the tongue is curled back towards the front of the hard palate. If
I have understood aright, all retroflex sounds are rhotic; but certainly
not all rhotic sounds - for example the uvular trill - are retroflex.

The r-colored vowels are also sometimes termed 'retroflex', but IME the
term retroflex is now normally reserved for the set of consonants made in
the retroflex place of articulation.

>
>   (whereas
>> "rhotic" means "having to do with r's and their differences)?
> Yes, see above.
Amen.

>  Somebody else
>> told me that my American "r" (in "American" and "car")  was probably an
>> approximant, and he distinguished it from a "retroflex."  Have I
>> misunderstood him?
>
> 1. It's an approximant-- as you say, "the POA is almost reached but isn't"
> .
Yep - the rest snipped - but I agree with what Roger wrote.
======================================================================

On Friday, November 5, 2004, at 07:19 , Mark J. Reed wrote:

[snip]
> Well, "rhotic" is basically used to describe the family of sounds which
> have been represented by the letter R in Latin scripts, or its
> equivalents in other scripts.  It is a "family" relationship because
> there is no set of isolated traits you can point to and say "that
> constitutes rhoticity".  Any two rhotics will have some features which
> overlap, but there will be other rhotics which completely lack the
> feature shared by the first two (overlapping elsewhere).
This is more or less what I said way back in February. But two or three
members said that rhoticity was a more precise feature and that led to
Dirk's explanation which I have given above.


>> Is rhotacized the same as rhotic?
>
> No.  The term "rhotacized" (or "rhoticized"; I've seen both spellings
> and tend to use the latter) refers to the influence of a rhotic on an
> adjacent non-rhotic sound.
Yep. It would be better to keep "rhoticized" as the term for this feature
and to limit "rhotacized" to describe the change of another sound,
typically [z] or [l], to /r/ (or some similar rhotic). But in practice
'rhotacized' is found used for both features. However, I have never seen
the second feature termed 'rhoticized'.

> For example, most Americans have [a] in
[example snipped - but I agree with it]

>
>> Somebody else told me that my American "r" (in "American" and "car")
>> was probably an approximant, and he distinguished it from a
>> "retroflex."  Have I misunderstood him? (Can't remember who it was;
>> I'm trying to consolidate my responses into one big one here.)
>
> That was me.  I didn't intend to contrast "approximant" with
> "retroflex"; "approximant" is manner of articulation, while "retroflex"
> is place of articulation.
Yep - and a retroflex approximant occurs in some languages. The IPA symbol
is [ɻ] or in CXS [r\`].

> I certainly don't have a retroflexion
> in [r\], and would be surprised to find that most Americans do.
Certainly not normal in Brit English either, where /r/ is usually either
[r] or [r\].

Ray
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