Re: Personal langs and converse of aux

On Mon, 5 Feb 2001, jesse stephen bangs wrote:

> Yoon Ha Lee sikayal:
>
> > 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.
I wasn't exposed to it in childhood, and my tongue tip doesn't seem very
limber.  I can do a continued uvular flap, but I can't sustain the
quasi-trill I produce more than a second or two.  Practice.  :-)

> 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).
(ruefully)  Native English speaker and crippled Korean speaker, is more
like it.  And Korean has a tap, but through most of my childhood I
substituted the American-English retroflex approximant and, due to the
large number of Americans in Seoul, was understood, if teased about my
horrible American accent.  My Korean pronunciation is actually better now
than it was during my 2nd multiple-year stay in Korea because now I have
a better clue of the phonetics.

The rounded front vowels took a little practice but honestly weren't
bad.  Distinguishing some of the mid-front vowels in American English
screws me over.  And phonetics/phonology is interrupted about every 5
min. by someone objecting, "But *I* don't say [insert sample word here]
with a [insert place or manner of articulation here]."  Heck, I discovered
that my [t] and [d] are sometimes dental and sometimes alveolar....

YHL