Re: New Conlang

On Sat, 30 Jul 2005 22:54:39 +0300, John Vertical
<johnvertical@...> wrote:

>Is there an official way in any phonetic alphabet to denote the length of a
>trill? How does one mark whether /r:/ is /444/ or /4444/ or /4444444/ ... ?
I'm guessing by /444/ you mean a trill with three contacts?

Taps/flaps are ballistic movements and by definition can only have one
contact.  Trills, on the other hand, are caused by the Bernouilli effect,
so strictly speaking a trill is not the same thing as multiple taps or
a "prolonged" or geminate tap. As far as I'm aware, most languages aren't
precise in the number of contacts that constitute a trill (I know Finnish
is supposed to have simple & geminate trills, but I don't know if any
studies have measured how speakers distinguish the two). The IPA doesn't
make any provision for the exact number of contacts in a trill (so a trill
could have only a single contact in rapid speech), so the distinction would
best be made between [r] and [r:] and [r::] if necessary, indicating
progressively longer trills.

Bfowol