Mark J. Reed wrote:

> OK, pardon my ignorance, but what is this "vocalized r" you keep
> talking about?  I've admittedly have all of six weeks of formal German
> training, but you'd think that sort of thing would have been
> mentioned?  As far as we were taught, |r| always means /R/ (or
> whatever) in German orthography.

Ditto. But very few intro.courses get into non-book-standard speech very 
seriously. (How many Spanish courses mention -s > h?, or the dropping of -d- 
in -ado?)

Replacing it with [6] is mighty
> strange, especially from the perspective of a native speaker of a
> decidedly rhotic variety of English.  Is it a feature of the standard
> dialect?  What conditions the replacement?  Why is |er| sometimes [E6]
> and sometimes just [6]?

Not all that strange, maybe...My _impression_ (just from reading various 
German-speakers' YAPTs here) is that it's pretty much like non-rhotic 
Amer.Engl where e.g. "pier" is [pI@], except the German off-glide is the 
lower [6].

And Henrik wrote earlier:
> Of course, /@/ vs. /6/ vs. /a/ is a mean phonemic contrast for foreign 
> learners

When is [@] phonemic?? Again, my impression has always been that it's simply 
unstressed /e/, in final syllables or in some prefixes like ge-, be-. 
Otherwise, mutatis mutandis, a similar three-way contrast does exist in 
Engl., where [@] and [V]~[3] are resp. unstressed/stressed allophones of 
/@/; and of course we have /a/ though it's usually [A] I think.

But then, I don't think German has alternations like "telegraph ~telegraphy" 
['tEl@gr&f] ~[t@'lEgr@fi] where [@] can replace various vowels.