Re: Rating Languages

* 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.

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