r's (was Re: Rating Languages)

On Wednesday, September 26, 2001, at 04:02 AM, taliesin the storyteller
wrote:

> * Yoon Ha Lee said on 2001-09-25 15:54:56 +0200
>> If Korean has a trilled r, I never heard it in any of the Seoul or Pusan
>> area dialects I encountered; it may, of course, have existed in some past
>> form of Korean, but my personal knowledge only goes back to the speech of
>> my grandmother's generation. Korean only has the alveolar tap, [..]
>
> The Norwegian r used to be trilled by "all", (IIRC there's an isolated
> valley where ppl still trill it,) now it's generally a tap, and in
> some places it's /x/, /X/, /j/, /R/... easy to pick out dialects by,
> actually... My short r's are tapped, the long r's tend to be trilled,
> but that's just me being damaged by conlanging I think :) (All my
> conlangs so far have used alveolar trilled r).
>
<laugh>  I feel vaguely guilty including sounds I can't produce in a
conlang.  Isn't that silly?  So far Czevraqis and Tsuhon use the alveolar
tap, but dialectal variations undoubtedly have many different flavors of
"r".

> Heh, try humming on trilled r's :) tongue-tip starts to feel funny after
> a while, not to mention one's ears. Uvular trilled r's - now those are
> hard, they always peter out on me.
>
Strangely enough, I found the uvular trill easier.  Win some, lose
some.  :-)  They do make your tongue feel funny after a while too, though.

YHL