Irish Speak

[benhall.1]

When I checked on an older Sarah Brightman clip (really, just the first one I came to), in order to make sure I wasn't talking nonsense earlier, I swear there was no 'r'; instead there was a clear stop.

And you're right: for me, too, there was no R that time. As I mentioned, it seems to come out at random. I've never been able to predict it.

The thing is, when she sang it correctly, it was beautiful. With the intrusive 'r', it's just plain ugly.

[Nanohedron]

When I checked on an older Sarah Brightman clip (really, just the first one I came to), in order to make sure I wasn't talking nonsense earlier, I swear there was no 'r'; instead there was a clear stop.

And you're right: for me, too, there was no R that time. As I mentioned, it seems to come out at random. I've never been able to predict it.

The thing is, when she sang it correctly, it was beautiful. With the intrusive 'r', it's just plain ugly.

Ear of the beholder, I suppose ... although I do share your aesthetic preference for clear enunciation when it comes to singing of that kind. In everyday speech, I simply take it as an occasionally arising artifact of accent. To me, it's another iteration of what I call "relaxed speech"; all languages, dialects and accents have their own relaxed ways of speaking when being informal, mutating what is otherwise considered proper pronunciation. And I also think it might be a possible support of my hypothesis that non-rhotic speakers are likely, in certain instances, to reflexively hear the approximant R as a vowel, precisely because it's taken us this long to pin it down and come to grips with it.

Speaking of ugly, I've always had an ambivalent relationship with my native language: While I think it's one of the best there are for nuance and potential beauty of expression, I've never liked the way it hits my ear. To me, there's always been something angular and unlovely about its sound shapes (for lack of a better term), whatever the accent. Recently, though, I've come across commentary from European Germanic speakers who consistently describe English as sounding fundamentally soft and gentle. I don't know how speakers of non-Germanic languages hear it, but I'll still take that in a heartbeat.