Re: rhotics

On Sun, 3 Dec 2000, Danny Wier wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 30, 2000 at 10:48:08PM -0500, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>
> > *sigh* I can't whistle nor trill an /r/ :-(
> > The bilabial trill is about the only trill I can do.
>
> Don't feel bad.  It took me A LOT of practice to get my tongue to vibrate
> against my alveolar (it really trills somewhere in the palatal region for
> me).  I really had to learn to say [r:] in order to speak Spanish and not
> sound like a gringo.  I probably sound more Scottish now though.
>
> The French/German [R] was a lot easier for me.
<nod>  Me too.  The only reason I can think of is that I *took* French
and German...which might be a fairly big reason, but I never did produce
the French [R] properly during the 5 years I took French.

BTW, is there any difference normally between the French and German
[R]'s?  I was reading some game instructions in French in a gamestore and
someone commented that I was reading in French but the r's sounded
German.  At that point I was probably over-flapping the [R] because
otherwise it tends to lapse back into the darned English approximant (I
figured exaggerating it was better than not producing it at all, and
maybe someday I could produce it more, hmm, delicately?).  <shrug>