Re: 'rhotic plosives' (was: laterals)

>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.

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.

Here you can find some tips on how to pronounce
trills:

http://maillists.uci.edu/mailman/public/vastavox/2002-January/000049.html

"I remember Doug Honorof mentioning about the need to
brace the moving part against a rigid part to allow a
trill to occur. In the alveolar trill that was the sides
of the tongue against the upper side teeth (bicuspids).
In this instance [the uvular trill], the back of the
tongue serves as the rigid surface and the vertical
walls of the the soft palate (back near the tonsils)
brace themselves against it to create the necessary
rigidity. To get the uvula to trill the back of the
tongue grooves to make a tube that sends the air
stream straight up to bounce the uvula, which sits
on the top of the tube like a flap valve.

I stress that getting a trill is a balance between
tension and flexibility. Too much of either and the
trill will stop happening (or never start in the
first place)."

That is, when speeding up the 'da-da-da-da-da...'
into 'rrrrrra...', a critical point is reached when
you have to give up controlling the movement of the
tongue consciously and concentrate in controlling the
distribution of tensions. When the tip of the tongue
is loose while the rest of it is rigidized and braced,
the pressure of the airstream sent towards the tip
will make it vibrate against the alveolar ridge much
quicker than anything you could achieve through its
direct muscular movement.


>> 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.


>> 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.

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.

Cheers,
Javier

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