Re: Mutable R's

Quoting Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>:

> En réponse à Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>:
>
> >
> > What is Czech r-caret? I've never seen any descent description of it
> ...
>
> Alveolar fricative trill (or "voiced strident apico-alveolar trill" if
> you want
> a complete description :)) ). Used to have its own IPA character ("latin
> small
> letter r with long leg", Unicode position 027C), which became obsolete
> in 89.
> Now rendered in IPA as [r_r] (in X-SAMPA), i.e. "raised r".
Ok.

> > my
> > unhelpful encyclopaedia's pronunciation guides of Czech names makes
> is
> > [rS],
> > which I find slightly difficult to believe, and looking up the
> article
> > on Czech,
> > it says simultaneous [r] and [Z], which ought to be impossible.
> >
>
> Yet it's a correct description, as it's basically how it sounds like. I
> don't
> know if my pronunciation is exactly correct, but to my ears it seems to
> be so.
> I basically pronounce it like an [r], i.e. apically trilled, but instead
> of
> having the body of the tongue low, I have it close to the palate, so
> that there
> is added friction to the trill. It definitely sounds like simulatenous
> [r] and
> [Z].
Hm, my [Z]'s are made with the tip of the tongue (that's the apex, right?), so
it'd still not _articulatorily_ be simultaneous [r] and (what I think of as)
[Z].

I can, in isolation, easily enough produce an alveolar trill with a
simultaneous fricative made with the upperside of the tongue; I can't believe
it be particularly hard to learn to do it in actual speech with some training.
So if it's the thing, the difficulty of Czech r-caret does indeed seem to be
highly exagerated. I mean, it's alot simpler than those dastardly glottal
stops!

                                                               Andras

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