Re: rhotics (was Hellenish oddities)

On Tue, 28 Nov 2000, BP Jonsson wrote:

> YHL:
>
> >A friend suggested repeating [d] rapidly.  Occasionally it *almost*
> >works.  <wry look>
>
> Try placing the tounge rather relaxed in position for [t] and then force a
> stream of air through.  This will produce a voiceless trill.  Once you
> master that effortlessly you can add voice, then pronounce it before and
> between vowels.  That's how my founetiks teacher thought those of us who
> couldn't manage elegant r's, and I daresay he learnt it himself that way,
> since his natural r was uvular.
I'll try that, though it's going to sound like stuttering for quite a
while yet.  <rueful look>  I wish I were a singer; vocalists seem to have
to learn all sorts of useful phones.

> >Korean has some form of r that I *can* produce, which sounds kind of but
> >not quite like a tap.  (The American approximant? also suffices,
> >considering the number of Americans in and around Seoul.)  In
> >syllable-final position the r manifests as an [l], I think.
>
> According to the books Korean /r/ is a tap initially and intervocalicly, an
> alveolar approximant(*) before consonants and [l] in final position.  One
> of my books screws things up by transcribing the phoneme as /l/, since the
> author believes that the Hangul {r} character was originally [l] in all
> positions, while the ancient character looking like an uppercase Delta was
> [r].  I guess his guess is as good as anybody's.
>
> (*The American approximant is dorso-retroflex rather than apico-alveolar as
> the Korean one.)
Tap it is, then.  It sounds a little "weaker" than the taps on the
UNIL/Cours de phonétique sound sample, but I guess there's room for
variation.  :-p

YHL