Re: 'rhotic plosives' (was: laterals)

Quoting Javier BF <uaxuctum@...>:

> Try pronouncing "da-da-da-da-da..." quickly, very
> quickly, yet more and more and more quickly. You'll
> end up pronouncing a trill "rrrrrrra", because a
> vibratory movement is simply a raising/lowering
> where the distance between the high and the low
> point is small. And when the sequence of plosives
> is very quick you literally don't have time to
> raise and lower your tongue but only a small
> distance, while during a normal plosive that
> distance is much longer because you aren't urged
> to raise your tongue again just after a millisecond
> of having lowered it.
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.

> But as for what defines a plosive, which is not the
> distance covered by the tongue during its upward and
> downward movement but the fact that the airstream is
> effectively blocked and then released, this occurs
> the same both in normal plosives as in tap and trill
> plosives. If no effective block is produced during
> a trill, you get sounds such as the "rz" and "rzh"
> fricative trills you can hear in certain varieties
> of Spanish, in Czech or in Mandarin.
>
>
> >> A tap would
> >> make sense to call a very brief stop,
>
> A plosive trill is just quick succession of plosive
> taps. Or, that's to say, a quick succession of brief
> plosives.
>
>
> >OK (as I said, I'm less familiar with flaps) - brief tho it may be, is the
> >duration long enough for the block air stream to produce any significant
> >plosion?
>
> 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.

> >Even if we discount the 'plosive' description of a flap, nevertheless, we
> >can say that a flap is caused a rapid contact between two organs of
> >articulation. How can you have a rapid contact (i.e. rapid closure) and
> >the thing still be a flap?
>
> 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, [@`].

                                                Andreas