Re: rhotics (was Hellenish oddities)

On Sun, 3 Dec 2000, H. S. Teoh wrote:

> On Sun, Dec 03, 2000 at 11:14:25AM -0500, Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
> [snip]
> > One of my housemates finds it really irritating that I can't just hear
> > the thing and produce it, but a) he's a vocalist and has been trained to
> > do so and b) he spent a good portion of his life in Argentina, and speaks
> > Spanish.  I'm not a vocalist, I'm just a Yoon Ha and I have to learn it
> > the long way.  :-p
>
> Hmm. I daresay I'm quite good at picking up sounds and reproducing them,
> but sounds like trills are hard for me because I've never in my life
> "trilled" my tongue before. I've picked up a few Korean words just by
> listening to my Korean friends speak, and they tell me my pronunciation is
> very accurate. I can pick up tones fairly accurately too (but perhaps not
> surprising because my L1 is tonal). However, the problem is, although I
> *know* how a trill should sound, I just can't reproduce it no matter how
> hard I try. I've been trying to follow Dan's suggestion, but all I get is
> a very dry tongue tip from so much blowing :-P
I can recognize rather more sounds than I can produce reliably.  I've
been getting better with more exposure.  When I started French in middle
school I was abominably bad.  :-)  Practice, as with all things, seems to
help.  And phonetics helps too because if I can look at diagrams and
figure out what's *supposed* to happen in my mouth, instead of guessing,
I have a better chance of producing the sound in question.  Most of the
"fuzzy" descriptions (halfway between sound A and B in English) I've seen
in language books don't help me very much.

> It's one thing to be able to "pick up" a sound easily, but it's another
> thing whether you can produce it yourself. I don't think it's fair to
> demand that someone "reproduce the sound" just by "hearing it". For one
> thing, whether or not you can distinguish between phonemes isn't exactly
> trivial. (Try asking a typical L1 English speaker to tell the difference
> between Chinese tones.) OTOH, even after you have learnt to identify the
> sound, doesn't mean you can produce it.
I agree, but I guess it can be irritating to someone who speaks the
language well to listen to someone stumbling through.  I have perfect
pitch and my nerves go on end when I hear some people sing, even though
it's completely unfair to expect everyone to be in tune even relatively
(heck, I'm sometimes off when I sing; the only difference is that I know it).

Typical L1 English speakers can't tell the difference between Korean "s"
and "ss," and I have met very few Americans who can pronounce part of my
sister's name, which starts with [kj]; they usually end up aspirating the
[k], and it makes a difference.  As long as they're trying....

YHL