Tampering with history

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

"T.I. Console" <info at TICONSOLE.NL> wrote:

>Lars Martin Fosse wrote:
>
>Retroflexion may be both. Modern Norwegian and Swedish both have
>retroflexion, which developed quite independently of Dravidian languages!
>
>I can add two more examples: two `remote' areas of the former Roman empire,
>namely Puglia in South Italy and the island of Sardinia, have preserved the
>the retroflex sound, spelled as a double dd, and pronounced as the Indian
>retroflex .d On the whole, the language in these areas is far more archaic than
>modern Italian, for example, they still say `kelu' for, where the Italians say
>`cielo' (`heaven', Latin: celum. Pronunciation c=k). So, I cannot escape the
>expression that there is a development WITHIN Indo-European of retroflex
>sounds, and this already in an early stage.

Not so early for Sardo and S. Italian (Campania, Sicily, Calabria,
Puglia) /ll/ > /d.d./, a change which is dated to the 14th c. AD. (In
Puglia, retroflexion has now been lost: d.d. > dd).  Some varieties
of Asturian (Bable) in Spain also have /d./ from Latin /ll/.

Another example is English, where /r/ is pronounced as retroflex [R.]
in some varieties (notably American English).

The "sh" sounds of Russian and Polish (sz) are also retroflex, at
least from an acoustical point of view, and are pronounced exactly
like Sanskrit <s.>, Swedish <rs> or Chinese <sh>.

Retroflex sounds occur in many other languages of the world, from
Africa through Eurasia to the Americas.  They are particularly common
in Australian Aboriginal languages.


=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl
Amsterdam