Re: rhotics (was Hellenish oddities)

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

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.


T

--
The most powerful one-line C program: #include "/dev/tty" -- IOCCC