Talk:Pronunciation of English /r/

History of the initial rounded r

I think this is worth noting in the article. Here is the story told the best of my ability.

In Anglo-Saxon, there were two "r" sounds, one rounded and the other not. The two were distinguished in the beginning of a word. The distinction survived Middle English, the former as "wr" and the latter as "r," leading to modern orthographic distinctions in homophonic pairs: "rap" vs. "wrap", "write" vs. "right", and "reck" vs. "wreck." Although the rounded "r" has died out from British English, it is still used in many varieties of American English, now used for all initial r's.

However, before adding it, I would like to have a second opinion first. Thank you.LakeKayak (talk) 01:06, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

The information is present on the page Phonological change and displayed as followed:

A potential incipient example of allophones producing phonological change can be seen in child language acquisition in English. In American and some varieties of British English, the phoneme /r/ has a distinctly rounded pronunciation at the onset of a stressed syllable, particularly at the beginning of a word, regardless of the following vowel (except for a rounded vowel). That is, the words round, rich, reason, rat all begin with a labialized ar [ɹʷ].

This rounding feature is the product of the merger of two earlier phonemes, a rounded r /rʷ/ and a plain r /r/, dating from Old English. This contrast was found only in word-initial position and survived late enough in Middle English to become enshrined in the standard spelling, as wretch vs retch, wring vs ring, and so on. In the mid-15th century we start finding spelling confusions indicating that the contrast between /r/ and /rʷ/ had been lost, as initial /r/ acquired rounding. What were originally two different phonemes found themselves in complementary (mutually exclusive) distribution, a single phoneme pronounced [rʷ] in initial and stressed positions and [r] in other positions. Thus, the features of English r-phonetics are in part due to phonemic merger, not mere change in pronunciation.

I think that it would be possible to add this to the article without problems. LakeKayak (talk) 03:58, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

Apical [ɹ̺] vs. retroflex [ɻ]

Does anyone know the difference between these two? Even after reading stuff like this Wells post and the relevant sections in Ladefoged's A Course in Phonetics ("Rhotic Vowels", "Rhotacized Vowels"), I never understood what the difference between a postalveolar approximant and a retroflex one people sometimes claim there is was, apart from the one between apical and molar. But if people claim a need for a distinction between apical and molar [ɹ] in notation, as seen in the Wells post and in extIPA, that means they do feel the need to distinguish something that cannot be accomplished by simply using ⟨ɹ⟩ and ⟨ɻ⟩, right? In fact I have found scholars refer to the apical /r/ as "retroflex".[1][2] Perhaps this is the distinction between the true, subapical retroflex and the apical postalveolar "retroflex", and some people would like a symbol other than ⟨ɻ⟩ for the apical /r/ because they are opposed to referring to the latter as "retroflex"? This has puzzled me for so long, and would love to know if there is any difference. Nardog (talk) 15:19, 18 February 2018 (UTC)

According to Laver (1994), [ɻ] is "used as a pronunciation of /r/ in a number of American accents of English and of rhotic accents of Southwestern England" and "has the tip of the tongue more curled than is the case in the post-alveolar approximant [ɹ], and presents the tip of the tongue or even the underside of the tip/blade to the palato-alveolar part of the hard palate" (p. 299). Then he proposes ⟨ɹ^⊢⟩ or ⟨ψ⟩ be used as the transcription symbol for the bunched/molar r. So presumably the justification there for a new symbol, rather than simply switching between ⟨ɹ⟩ and ⟨ɻ⟩, is that [ɹ] stands for the prototypical form of /r/ in non-rhotic British English, which is an apical postalveolar approximant with little to no retroflexion, and therefore a dedicated symbol for the molar r is called for. But this assumption is false because Wells is a non-rhotic Anglo-English speaker yet uses a molar r. (Besides, how could one assume the distribution of the apical and molar variants is a regional one when there is virtually no auditory difference?) So I still don't find the argument for a notational distinction between the apical [ɹ] and retroflex [ɻ] convincing.

In fact, Rogers (2014) makes no distinction between the apical [ɹ] and retroflex [ɻ], and refers to the variant supposedly common in Britain as simply "the retroflex version" (p. 59). As Tiede (2007) succinctly describes, /r/ is realized with varying tongue shapes but is broadly categorized into "retroflex" (apical constriction) and "bunched" (dorsal constricution). Ball (2017) proposes, using existing IPA/extIPA symbols and diacritics, a transcription capturing four degrees of apicality/bunching: ⟨ɻ, ɹ̺, ɹ̺̈, ɹ̈⟩. So it seems to me, if only two degrees (i.e. apical/retroflex vs. molar/bunched) are desired to be distinguished, the use of ⟨ɻ, ɹ⟩ is just enough, not only because there is no other contrasting sound that could be represented by these symbols in English but also because it doesn't require extra diacritics, unlike the extIPA recommendation ⟨ɹ̺, ɹ̈⟩.

(This reveals not only that the difference between [ɹ] and [ɻ] is negligible as far as apical variants are concerned, but also that ⟨ɻ⟩ may have an even stronger basis for denoting an apical /r/ than ⟨ɹ⟩ if [ɹ] can also stand for a dorsal variant. However, to use [ɹ] for a dorsal is obviously not accurate because the primary place of articulation is not coronal but palatal or perhaps pre-velar. Hence a more accurate representation might be, somewhat surprisingly, ⟨j̻⟩, ⟨ɰ̟⟩, or so on.) Nardog (talk) 04:31, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

@Nardog: Isn't the dorsal version simply a kind of an alveolo-palatal approximant (a lowered [ʑ])? Mr KEBAB (talk) 17:18, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

@Mr KEBAB: No, it's much more retracted, at least in my book. When I produce [ʑ] and then lower my tongue, it sounds like [j], whereas when I try to produce a molar /r/ and then raise my tongue, the blade touches the hard palate and the dorsum the velum. Laver (1994: 302) calls it a "voiced labial pre-velar approximant with tongue-tip retraction". When you produce a lowered [ʑ], does it sound like an r? Nardog (talk) 05:49, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

@Nardog: I can make it sound like an alveolar [ɹ] without a problem, and I'm pretty sure that's one of the pronunciations of /r/ in Dutch (it is simplified to [j] or at least [ɪ̯] from time to time which sounds strange to Belgians, like [ai] for /ɛi/). Your version sounds more postalveolar/retroflex. These doppelgängers of the canonical versions of [ɹ] and [ɻ] are quite interesting by the way. Some cardinal vowels also have them: [ø] = [ʉ] (more or less) and [ɶ] = [ɒ] (these are more similar). Mr KEBAB (talk) 10:48, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

Well, we're talking about English /r/, which is—or sounds like—postalveolar, in case you didn't notice the title. ;) Nardog (talk) 04:05, 23 February 2018 (UTC)