Episode 160: Approximant-ly English
The History of English Podcast
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The R Sound in English
The r sound is one of the most difficult sounds in english to analyze historically. There are actually several different r sounds that are quite distinct from each other. And since they are all represented with the same letter, we can't really rely on spellings to tell us which sound was being made at any particular time. Some dialects usually drop the r sound altogether after a vowel. That arles pronunciation became widespread in england in the 17 hundreds and it's probably not even the original r sound.
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