Re: Hellenish oddities

On Tue, Nov 21, 2000 at 11:34:41PM -0500, Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
> On Tue, 21 Nov 2000, Oskar Gudlaugsson wrote:

> Also, face it: there are people like me who *still* can't reliably roll
> r's.  (Well, I can manage an approximation to the French uvular? and
> German flapped? r's, but the trill is beyond me and my taps are very
> unreliable.)  Or produce other sounds "on-target."  I've seen a few
> pronunciation guides that tell you what sounds *will* be understand as
> the target phoneme by native speakers, even if your "accent is funny."  I
> think this is also useful as a stopgap while I learn to produce various
> sounds.  (I wish I had been born to a language that *has* rolled r's,
> darnit....)
Don't despair, it just comes one day, a bit like learning to whistle. It
took me years. More than half of England is r-less, /r/ is at best a sort
of semivowel. And then you encounter languages with *several* different
r phonemes, and you can't even do one :-(

Try saying [tr] or perhaps [tDr], I think that's how I finally got there.

Keith