Re: THEORY: language and the brain [Interesting article]

At 10:34 02/07/03, Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
wrote:
>En réponse à John Leland :
>
>>On Japanese having "r but no l" while other Asian languages have only "l"
>>my observation (and my impression is that more qualified experts agree) is
>>that this distinction is largely a matter of the way the languages are
>>romanized. Listening to Japanese pronounciation the sound romanized
>>as r is more like l at least in many contexts.
>
>Not to me. The Japanese r is just an alveolar flap (and the Japanese people
>I've met agree with me) which is no different from the Spanish single 'r'
>between two vowels. Since they don't have a l, they replace it with the
>alveolar flap (the closest thing to an alveolar lateral they have), but
>that doesn't make it any l-like. And I listen daily to enough Japanese
>(between songs and anime) to have quite an informed opinion on that.

I think this is more to do with English than with Japanese.  I've heard
English speakers describing the Japanese r as "exactly halfway between r
and l", and there is something to this to my ear, but this is surely
because English r is just an approximant.

I sometimes wonder how speaker of those English dialects which have the
alveolar flap as allophones of /d/ and /t/ hear it.

Ian

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