Re: retroflex consonants

> The Indic languages have them, but probably borrowed them
> from the surrounding Dravidian languages.
Incidentally, in the dialect of Hindi that I'm being taught, the
"retroflexes" aren't the tongue-curled-back kind where the underside of
the tongue touches the roof of the mouth; they're more like subtly
backed alveolars.  In exceedingly careful speech, they seem to have a
weird /r\_-/ (that's a retracted alveolar approx.) onglide, so a word
like /d`ravId`/ comes out sounding like [dr\a:vIr\`_-d].  The series
fronter than that tends toward dental in ordinary speech, and might
recover back to alveolar when retroflexes are being pronounced
retroflexed.

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Shreyas Sampat