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vonPeterhof
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 4772 days ago
715 posts - 1527 votes 
Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German
Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish
| Message 41 of 41 09 December 2011 at 4:59pm | IP Logged |
WentworthsGal wrote:
| Well, when I initially posted this question, I had no idea how many different Rs there were..! I was thinking just 2 existed - rolling R and English R. How wrong I was lol!! |
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Yep, there's a lot of them - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhotic_consonant. Representing all those sounds in different Indo-European languages with the same letter isn't much of a problem, since they all descend from the same proto-Indo-European phoneme. It gets more confusing when this framework is applied to some non-Indo-European languages. For example, Kazakh has both the alveolar tap (Spanish short R) and the uvular fricative (French R), but only the first one is treated as an R-sound. The other one is essentially an allophone of [g]; speakers of Dutch and Arabic can get away with pronouncing it as a [ɣ]. The Mandarin sound represented by the letter R can be either an English R or a French J, depending on the speaker. In fact in Russian transliterations it is written as "ж" (zh) in the initial position and as "р" (r) in the final. And Japanese and Korean don't really distinguish between R and L, and some consider the prevailing transliterations completely arbitrary.
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