Newsgroups: sci.lang
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!news.mathworks.com!udel!gatech!swrinde!howland.reston.ans.net!ix.netcom.com!netcom.com!alderson
From: alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: German and French uvular 'r'
In-Reply-To: millert@grad.csee.usf.edu's message of 16 Nov 1994 05:05:00 GMT
Message-ID: <aldersonCzDp0y.8oy@netcom.com>
Reply-To: alderson@netcom.com
Fcc: /u52/alderson/postings
Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest)
References: <3ac3ts$oi1@mother.usf.edu>
Date: Wed, 16 Nov 1994 21:00:33 GMT
Lines: 29

In article <3ac3ts$oi1@mother.usf.edu> millert@grad.csee.usf.edu
(Timothy Miller) writes:

>It seems that the German uvular 'r' was adopted from the French, or so it has
>been suggested.  How is it that French could have influenced German so
>profoundly that the while phoneme would have gone from an alveolar trill to
>the French uvular fricative without having also other profound effects on
>grammar, vocabulary, etc?

You need to read up on the field of sociolinguistics.

The way it came about was this:  French at the time was a prestige language in
European circles.  The German nobility spoke French as well as German, and
borrowed the pronunciation into their German *as a mark of Francophone savoir
faire.*  This pronunciation was then adopted by those who aspired to do things
like the nobility.

>And what could have been the cause of the French transition from an alveolar
>'r' to a uvular one?

Actually, the uvular trill is not general French, but Parisian/Picardian (I
think).  As to how it arose, all it takes is a transfer from alveolar trill to
pharyngealization (as in the history of English), and you're half way there.
It can then spread, just as in the case of German, by sociolinguistic pressure.
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
