Re: Personal langs and converse of aux

jesse stephen bangs wrote:
>
> Yoon Ha Lee sikayal:
>
> > > Aspirated stops distinct from unaspirated stops
> > > Rounded front vowels
> > > Unrounded back vowels
> > > The phones [T] and [D]
> > > The trilled /r/
> > > The untrilled American English /r/
> >
> > Dear God, trilled r's.  <slightly guilty look>  But I *am* working on the
> > trill, darnit...it just sounds shaky.
>
> Heh.  I admit that I cannot understand why some people find this sound
> difficult.  I have never had any difficulty at all with the trill, and
> used it as a child when I was playing around, long before I knew that it
> was actually used in language.  But I know several people that still are
> completely incapable of it, which mystifies me.
>
> There are other oddities, too, in people's phonetic ability.  I can
> pronounce the rounded front vowels without too much difficulty, but I
> can't distinguish [o] from [C].  My friend can do those two, but cannot
> hear or pronounce rounded front vowels!  And we're all native English
> speakers!  (Actually, YHL speaks Korean, but evidently Korean doesn't
> include a trill).
Hmm... I can do rounded front vowels, and distinguish between [o] and
[C]. I can do trilled r's in isolation, but for anything except
intervocallicly it just comes out as my English r or something hideous.

That reminds me - my English r certainly is alveolar, not retroflex.

I can't do whatever r they have in German, at least not in German words
- it just comes out as an English r, or a /@/ at the end of a word. At
least it doesn't sound as bad as some pronounciations I've heard.

--
Robert