Re: Mutable R's

On Tue, 2003-03-25 at 21:54, Christophe Grandsire wrote:
> En réponse �  Garth Wallace <gwalla@...>:
> > I'm pretty sure Japanese has [l\], not [4].
>
> ?! That's the first time I hear that one. To me, Japanese and Spanish have
> exactly the same rhotic, and it's definitely [4]. It doesn't sound like [l\] at
> all. Actually, it has nothing lateral in it!
To me, it sometimes sounds like [l] and sometimes like [4].

> Well, American intervocalic 'd' is commonly pronounced [4], so that's why you
> were taught it this way. And the usual comment that the Japanese 'r' is
> between 'r' and 'l' is only due to the fact that Japanese people pronounce [4]
> in borrowed words with a 'l'. But I am 100% sure that the Japanese 'r' is a
> simple [4].
And the fact that it sounds like [l]. That's in important one, that.
When I was learning Japanese and had native-speaker resources :) I
almost had a set of rules that explained when it was [l]-like and when
it was [4]-like. The only one I can remember is /rj/ (in things like
rya, RI+small ya), it sounded *very* much like [lj]. That *might* be
because my dialect of English has restrictions on where [r\] and [4] can
go, but then again, there's a very handy schwa-dropping rule.

Tristan.