Trilled r (was Hellenish oddities)

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On 23 Nov, Keith Alasdair Mylchreest wrote:

>On Tue, Nov 21, 2000 at 11:34:41PM -0500, Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
>> On Tue, 21 Nov 2000, Oskar Gudlaugsson wrote:
>
>
>> Also, face it: there are people like me who *still* can't reliably roll
>> r's.  (Well, I can manage an approximation to the French uvular? and
>> German flapped? r's, but the trill is beyond me and my taps are very
>> unreliable.)  Or produce other sounds "on-target."  I've seen a few
>> pronunciation guides that tell you what sounds *will* be understand as
>> the target phoneme by native speakers, even if your "accent is funny."  I
>> think this is also useful as a stopgap while I learn to produce various
>> sounds.  (I wish I had been born to a language that *has* rolled r's,
>> darnit....)
>
>Don't despair, it just comes one day, a bit like learning to whistle. It
>took me years. More than half of England is r-less, /r/ is at best a sort
>of semivowel. And then you encounter languages with *several* different
>r phonemes, and you can't even do one :-(
>
>Try saying [tr] or perhaps [tDr], I think that's how I finally got there.
    [Dtr] might work better. IME, what needs to be done is to
hold most of the tongue rigid while relaxing the tip enough
so that it can (literally) "flap in the wind".
    Doing something like [Dtr] (pulling the tongue in and up real fast)
while at the same time breathing out hard and fast, (and trying to
relax the tongue as much as possible while you're doing all this),
if done correctly, can produce a "whiplash" effect on the tongue tip,
which can lead to a trilled "r".
   ( My bill is in the mail.  ;-)  )

Dan Sulani

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