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Re: Rating Languages

From:taliesin the storyteller <taliesin@...>
Date:Wednesday, September 26, 2001, 10:58
* Yoon Ha Lee said on 2001-09-25 15:54:56 +0200
> Heather Rice: > > Yoon Ha again: > > > Spanish: the fact that my trilled r's come out stuttery even after > > > a lot of practice [..] > > If Korean has a trilled r, I never heard it in any of the Seoul or Pusan > area dialects I encountered; it may, of course, have existed in some past > form of Korean, but my personal knowledge only goes back to the speech of > my grandmother's generation. Korean only has the alveolar tap, [..]
The Norwegian r used to be trilled by "all", (IIRC there's an isolated valley where ppl still trill it,) now it's generally a tap, and in some places it's /x/, /X/, /j/, /R/... easy to pick out dialects by, actually... My short r's are tapped, the long r's tend to be trilled, but that's just me being damaged by conlanging I think :) (All my conlangs so far have used alveolar trilled r).
> > I don't know what your trouble with the Spanish r is. > > It's the sound "tt" in butter if you say butter > > EXTREMELY fast and change the tt to a dd. But > > <nod> Yeah--it's frustrating knowing *how* it's produced, but being > unable to *do* it for sustained periods of time. In one of my classes > a student was trying to figure out the trilled r, too, and a helpful > Hispanic classmate was trilling these long, beautiful 5-second r's, > and I could only listen in envy. Mine sputters out after a second at > best.
Heh, try humming on trilled r's :) tongue-tip starts to feel funny after a while, not to mention one's ears. Uvular trilled r's - now those are hard, they always peter out on me.
> [..] Sometimes I can get my tongue in a position where the trill will > last a bit longer, it's just harder to *get* it there with all these > vowels around it. =^)
Is it colored by a specific vowel? That's a Norwegian "problem", the tap is colored by /e/, so you get <tretten> 13 /t_he_Xretn=/ (approx.) Still working on removing that e, me. t.

Replies

BP Jonsson <bpj@...>
Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...>r's (was Re: Rating Languages)