Lovin' the liquids (was: Re: Mutable R's)

Dit Christophe:

>En réponse à Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>:
>
>>
>>  What is Czech r-caret? I've never seen any descent description of it ...
>
>Alveolar fricative trill (or "voiced strident apico-alveolar trill"
>if you want
>a complete description :)) ). Used to have its own IPA character ("latin small
>letter r with long leg", Unicode position 027C), which became obsolete in 89.
>Now rendered in IPA as [r_r] (in X-SAMPA), i.e. "raised r".
>
>>  my
>>  unhelpful encyclopaedia's pronunciation guides of Czech names makes is
>>  [rS],
>>  which I find slightly difficult to believe, and looking up the article
>>  on Czech,
>>  it says simultaneous [r] and [Z], which ought to be impossible.
>>
>
>Yet it's a correct description, as it's basically how it sounds like. I don't
>know if my pronunciation is exactly correct, but to my ears it seems to be so.
>I basically pronounce it like an [r], i.e. apically trilled, but instead of
>having the body of the tongue low, I have it close to the palate, so
>that there
>is added friction to the trill. It definitely sounds like simulatenous [r] and
>[Z].
Stateside, the only real chance we have here to practice this sound
is with the composer's name, Dvorak, which classical music stations
pronounce, quelle surprise, /"dvorZak/. To perpetuate the urban myth,
I don't know if it's the most difficult sound in the world to
produce, but my Linguistics 101 professor oh-so-many years ago said
that even native speakers don't master the sound until their tweens.
A tad extreme, perhaps, but as it can take a while for native
English-speaking children to master /l/ ("I wuv you, Mommy."), I
could see it taking at least a little time to nail /r_r/.

Kou

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