Episode 160: Approximant-ly English
The History of English Podcast
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The English of England Was Rotic
There's no evidence that speakers dropped the r sound after a vowel in old english, like we hear in many dialects to day. An alternate view is that english actually had a combination of r sounds using a variety of the sounds i described earlier. If that's true, the usage probably varied from region to region and even person to person. But one thing that we can say with some certainty is that some kind of r sound was pronounced in words that were spelled with an r.
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