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

En réponse à "Douglas Koller, Latin & French" <latinfrench@...>:

>...
>
> 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/.
A correct adaptation of the name as far as it goes :) .

 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.
Mmm... I'd expect such a sound to be abandoned very soon, and AFAIK the Czech r-
hacek is alive and kicking ;)) . Anyway, I don't know much about first language
acquisition, but it seemed to me that acquisition of sounds was actually
mastered very early by children, except those having a speech handicap of some
sort. I've also read a lot that young children had much more abilities to
produce sounds than adults, and that language acquisition in that case was more
a case of restricting their abilities to the only the sounds that are used in
their language, rather than a case of learning to produce new sounds that they
couldn't before.

>...
> 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/.
>
I thought this was only true of children with a speech impediment? I know that
the acquisition of clusters can take a while, but AFAIK the acquisition of
single sounds, as I said above, is really a case of restricting the abilities
rather than broadening them.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

It takes a straight mind to create a twisted conlang.

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