Re: Rating Languages

On Tuesday, September 25, 2001, at 02:22 AM, Heather Rice wrote:

>> Spanish: the fact that my trilled r's come out
>> stuttery even after a lot of
>>    practice and Dan Sulani's advice, though I think
>> I've been making them
>> too
>>    far forward, because when I moved my tongue back
>> a bit it became somewhat
>>    easier.  But then it starts sounding like I'm
>> inserting [h] before the
>>    trill.  I know, I know, practice...
>
> Korean doesn't have a trilled r?  I don't know a thing
> about Korean, except that King Sejong was considered a
> brilliant linguist and I have tried adapting some of
> the principles of Korean writing to my own writing
> systems.
>
:-)  Me too, for the unfortunately vertical Czevraqis script (unfortunate
in that I haven't figured out a way to have English notes and Czevraqis
stuff on the same page gracefully) and I believe Steg for one of his
conscripts (Roki...Rokibegami...?  help!) has used it as an influence, too.
   There are probably others.

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, though
what with the influx of Migeuk-saram (American people) the (American)
English approximant r will also be recognized.  I'm afraid "real" Koreans
are notoriously bad with English r's and l's.

Now as far as *Japanese* goes, there are a couple anime where speakers
sound like they're producing brief trills instead of taps.  (Whoever
voices Sanosuke in Rurouni Kenshin, for one.)  Hmm...

> 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.

> reminded me of it.  I have been told that to pronounce
> carro the common street way (not the way they teach
> you in class) is something like breathing the trill.
> I don't know how to explain it, but it is like doing a
> trill, but not touching the palate and breathing hard
> enough to trill the tongue.  It comes out sounding
> like a trilled h rather than a trilled r.  Maybe
> you're closer than you think.
:-)  I'll keep at it, then.  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.  =^)

YHL

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