Purple Nurple and the Phonics of the American "R"

A "purple nurple," for the luckily uninitiated, is when a buddy of yours grabs and twists your nipple until it turns purple with bruising. This is an extremely unpleasant thing guys do to each other. Ladies seem to be exempt from all but the most salacious of gentlemen.

I bring this up because it highlights nicely the R sound in American English.

The way the American (and often the Canadian) accent pronounces the letter R turns out to be rather unique in the collection of earthly languages. Father, mother, sister, brother, girl, and bird all showcase this particular sound. Try to imagine our closest language forbears, the Brits, and our their other offspring and our cousins, the Aussies.

They tend to take the and soften that R sound into "fath-ah," "muth-uh," and even "purh-ple."

Dialect coach Erik Singer mentions that the America R is so unique and so difficult of a tongue placement that it tends to be left out of constructed languages---fake languages created for artistic purposes like Elfish, Klingon, and Dothraki among others---because it sounds, well, just American.

This got me thinking about how the rules of each language and/or accent branch can be discovered by having lines of dialogue written in their languages and read by either non-native speakers or speakers with accents from different places.

I have a whole experiment brewing but not the time to explicate it here. I'll return to this...

One quick example: the word girl

American English: "grrl"
Scottish English: "gearl" or "gairl"