Re: 'rhotic plosives' (was: laterals)
| From: | Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> |
|---|
| Date: | Thursday, February 12, 2004, 8:12 |
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Quoting Joe <joe@...>:
> Javier BF wrote:
>
> >>Doesn't work, because I'm physically unable to carry out the tongue
> >>movements
> >>involved in making a [d] with trill frequency. [r] may be acoustically
> >>identical to a quick succesion of [d]'s, but not articulatorily.
> >>
> >>
> >
> >There seems to be a certain amount of people with
> >a natural inability or difficulty in pronouncing
> >certain sounds (especially alveolar plosive trills)
> >even though they may happen to be native speakers
> >of languages where those occur. Maybe you are one
> >of those, or else you simply find it too difficult
> >because you aren't used to pronouncing it.
> >
> >
>
> You've misunderstood him. He means that he simply could not pronounce
> a trill the same way he would a sequence of [d]s.
Indeed. An alveolar trill, as such, is quite easy for me, despite not occuring
in my native speech.
Quoting Javier BF <uaxuctum@...>:
> In d's and t's, the movement of the tongue is fully
> under conscious control, while it is less so in a
> tap and much less so in a trill, where the movement
> is actually performed by the airstream pressure,
> because there's no way you can have your tongue
> tip vibrating at a trill frequence by means of
> a conscious muscular movement.
That was my point. [r] is not a sped up version of a succession of [d]'s.
[snip]
Given the recent thread about the sublaminal postalveolar (AKA retroflex)
trill occuring in my native speech (and which I tend to substitute English
approximants with!), I find this splendidly ironic.
> >> If there is an effective closure, the plosion
> >> is produced _by necessity_.
> >
> >In theory yes, but at some point the pressure difference becomes so small
> you
> >can't notice it.
>
> I'd say the difference between the plosive 'rr' and
> the fricative 'rz' is easily noticeable, so even though
> the plosive pressure in 'rr' is not as high as in 'd'
> you can still detect there are plosions and not merely
> frication or frictionless air flow.
Having heard little Czech, I can't really comment on that. I've heard mutlipe
deviant descriptions of how r-hacek is actually pronounced.
> >> Just don't define a flap in terms of degree of closure
> >> but in terms of rhoticity, because what distinguishes
> >> a flap from non-rhotic plosives/fricatives/approximants
> >> is the quickness with which it is pronounced, not the
> >> degree of closure. In my other message I explained
> >> that degree of closure and rhoticity are two different
> >> articulatory dimensions that do not exclude each other.
> >
> >What's not helping here is that 2+ different definitions of rhoticity
> going
> >around here. Besides Javier's one (which is complete news to me) the
> lowered
> >third formant one. And they don't seem to be even vaguely coterminous,
> since
> >there's nothing "quick" about, say, [@`].
>
> The thing about the third formant tells you about
> the imprint of rhoticity in a spectrogram, but it
> tells you nothing about how the sound actually
> 'feels' from an impressionistic point of view nor
> about how to articulate it to produce the effect.
What in the blazing tells anything about how a sound "feels" if not a
spectrogramme? Certainly not any articulatory characteristicum, at any rate!
And that the lowered third formant definition doesn't say anything about how
to articulate it is kind of the point.
> OTOH, the rhoticity of [@`] is not of the single-pulse
> kind, but of the multiple-pulse kind, and is not
> produced by a quick controlled movement of the tongue,
> but by its bracing and distribution of tensions that
> cause the airstream pressure to make the loose tongue
> tip 'tremble' with vibratory pulses. In the case of
> rhotic vowels and rhotic approximants, you don't
> need to rigidize your tongue so much and so close
> to the alveolar ridge as in a plosive trill, because
> you don't need to produce a series of closures with
> the vibrating tip but only to cause the frictionless
> air flow to 'tremble' mildly.
If there's some pulsiness to [@`] - I'll leave it to our American friends to
confirm/deny that - there certainly isn't to [z`], or at least not anymore
than in [v], which I certainly hope you're not going to claim is a rhotic on
any definition, while the former is supposed to be one the lowered third
formant one.
Andreas