Re: What are the Sampa representations for various |r|s?

On Wed, Nov 03, 2004 at 10:27:13PM -0500, Sally Caves wrote:
> The retroflex "r."  What I, an American, say in pronouncing "American."
It is unlikely that what you, as an American, say in pronouncing
"American", is retroflex.  For most Americans it's [r\], which is an alveolar
approximant.

> The final retroflex "r."  What I, an American, say in pronouncing "car."  Is
> there much difference?  I feel that there is a minute one, maybe not enough
> to count.
Well, there is no release in "car" (otherwise it would be something like
"ca-ruh"), and there is also the fact that the -r changes the sound of
the "a" (called "r-coloration" or "rhoticization"), and represented by a
` on the vowel: [ka`r\].

> The flapped "r."  What a Latina might say in pronouncing her name "Sara."
[4]

> The front trilled "r," what a Welshman might say in pronouncing Ronabwy.  Is
> that [R]?
Nope, that's [r].  It's the most common rhotic among the world's languages,
and therefore gets the unadorned symbol.

> The voiceless front trilled "r," what a Welshman might say in pronouncing
> "rhan."  This is sometimes not actually a trill, so much as a "kind" of
> palatal fricative, the sound you get when you limit the voiceless trill to
> one "beat."
I don't know this sound.  A voiceless version of [r] would be written [r_0]...

> The voiced velar fricative.  What a Frenchwoman would say when pronouncing
> the word "rouge."  Is that the one represented by [R]?
The voiced velar fricative is [G], which is not a rhotic.  The
voiced *uvular* fricative is [R].

> The velar trill.  [R\]  What a uvularly athletic German of the "older
> generation" ;) might say in pronouncing "geradeaus."  I notice this sign
> requires two characters.  Does the backslash indicate that it is velar?
Again, uvular.  The backslash doesn't have any regular meaning in CXS;
it's just a way of getting another symbol out of a letter.  There are
lots of digraphs in CXS, just because ASCII doesn't have enough monographs.

> The retroflex flap, a sound I think I invented, which a Teonivar would say
> when pronouncing "Erahenahil" [paradise].  I've given two detailed
> descriptions of that sound in a thread called "Usage: rhotics, etc."   Is it
> invented or not?
Sorry, no.  It's a standard sound found in natlangs, especially on the
Indian subcontinent, and in CXS it's written [r`].  Note that unlike the
backslash, the ` does regularly mean "retroflex" in CXS.

> The alveolar flap (no retroflex), which is like the flapped Latin "r" but
> articulated at the palate or post alveolar.  What a Teonivar would say when
> pronouncing "yry firrimby" ("me all grateful," or "thank you.")
The alveolar *lateral* flap is [l\], but for a non-lateral flaps, CXS has only
one symbol for dental, alveolar, and postalveolar: [4].  I think there
are diacritics you can use to distinguish, but I'm not familiar with how
they work.

-Marcos