That’s why Orissa came to be Odisha
And then there are women named “Sarah” who pronounce their name (it seems to me) as “Sadah”. An Hispanic thing, maybe??
That /ʎ/ is the (older) pronunciation of ll in Spanish, and of lh in Portuguese. I don’t perceive it as an L sound at all.
I wonder if what you are hearing as distinctive in Catalan is a dark L? If you say the Catalan L, do you raise the back of your tongue towards the roof of your mouth?
One of the worldwide patterns mapped by the sound /r/ is the resistance to starting words with it. Here is a list of languages known to exclude initial /r/- from their phonological inventory:
Basque
Bengali (Kamarupa dialect)
Chalcatongo Mixtec
Golin
Guugu Yimidhirr
Hadiyya
Hittite
Hungarian (old)
Hurrian
Iberian
Iraqw
Japanese (old)
Kayardild
Korean
Koromfe
Kuman
Louisiana French (Platte Ville dialect)
Mbabaram
Minoan
Mongolic
Niuean
Piro
Pitta-Pitta
Samoyed: Nganasan, Selkup
Sardinian (Campidanian dialect)
Tamil
Telefol
Tungus-Manchu
Turkic
West Greenlandic
Yeniseian
Often the older attested forms of the above languages exclude initial /r/-, while more modern phases of the languages have accepted it. Even then, some old traces remain. For example, the Hungarian name for Russia is Orosz. It derives from the Slavic root *ros- for ‘Russia’, plus an extra /o/- on the front so it can be pronounced without an initial /r/-. This prothetic (stuck in front) vowel /o/- dates from a time when the Magyar speakers of Old Hungarian had recently encountered the Kievan Rus’ nation in the Volga steppes during the 9th century. Before the Magyars settled farther west in what became Hungary.
Did not know.
The middle, the back tries to go to the throat. In Spanish we say that Catalan “tries to swallow the L”.
Scooby Doo must be translated differently in those languages.
The ancient Romans called R the dog letter, littera canina.
When a Brit says “sorry” it sounds to me like “soddy”.
Since “l” has also been mentioned, I am reminded of the fact that I was looking at a book that supposedly described all the variants of English pronunciation. When I came to the statement that “‘l’ is lateral in virtually all dialects of English”, I stopped reading the book. Just for the record, in my dialect (but I am under the impression that this is pretty widespread in the US), the first letter in “lateral” is lateral and last letter isn’t. In the quoted sentence, about half of the "l"s are lateral.
Yep, that’s the intervocalic alveolar flap — [sɒɾɪ]
As opposed to American [sɑri]
“History and Etymology for dog’s letter - translation of Latin littera canina; from the fancied resemblance of the trilled r to the growl of a dog”
Well, I guess that tells us a bit about how ancient Latin was pronounced.
Once in Mexico City’s airport, I saw an ad that jokingly quoted someone saying “mejsí.” The figure was standing in front of the Eiffel Tower. I realized the Spanish letter j was not a bad way to represent the French r sound.
Sorry, that last one should be [sɑɹi]
In that case, based on your description, I would say the difference is that Catalan speakers use a dark L in contexts where a speaker of Castilian Spanish does not.
I occasionally see the terms “veddy proper” or “veddy British,” which play on that pronunciation (“veddy” being what “very” sounds like in a veddy proper British accent).
You could add some of the Ghanaian languages to that list. My son’s name starts with R, his African grandmother has never been able to pronounce it, she adds a vowel first.
Thanks for the tip! Which Ghanaian languages are those?
My grandson is Ghanaian-American and his name starts with R, but then he’s a native speaker of English.
Waali, maybe Sissala too. Waali has an “r” sound, for example lejaare - twenty, or kogri - benches, but it doesn’t seem to have words that start with “r”
That’s been confirmed for Sissala: page 57 of this study: https://commons.emich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://en.wikipedia.org/&httpsredir=1&article=1072&context=theses
Good catch!