For Sotho-Tswana speakers, the most striking difference in pronunciation as regards these two consonants is between Sotho and Tswana. Sesotho has a partiality towards h for certain terms where Setswana prefers g (a guttural one, pronounced like the J in Julio), e.g. hare (middle) instead of gare, holo (great, large) instead of (k)golo. In ancient Egyptian, I have noticed, this same h is often pronounced like the Setswana g, and yet obtains in words that, today, we would use r for. An example of this is ‘Tehuti’ (‘Thoth’), the name of a famous Egyptian Wisdom-god. The ‘huti’ is actually ruti in today’s parlance – suggesting that it was pronounced as the French still pronounce r (which is something like the guttural Setswana g).
Other h-to-r sound-shifts that mutated between language families include hiri (hair) – which became riri in Setswana, and the phrase pele ho (‘besides’: in Sotho pele is not just ‘in front’, it can mean ‘besides’), thus the Latin term pleuro (‘next to’). But there are instances where the r in Setswana corresponds well to the Indo-European r for given proto-terms. Examples include rulela (‘put on top’) and ‘rule’ (boss over, be on top); thari and ‘tarry’ (both meaning ‘[be] late, behind time’). The most consistent instance of this is when the r is onomatopoeic (echoes the natural sound obtaining in nature), thus thoromo and ‘tremor’, rora and ‘roar’. In similar vein, when formerly orderly components fall apart (and one imagines a rumbling sound as this happens), we get kgoropa (break down) and ‘corrupt’, also meaning ‘break down’.
