Re: Furrin phones in my own lect!

On 3/26/06, Herman Miller <hmiller@...> wrote:
> You'd think so, but one of the harder sounds for me to learn was [k].
Agreed.  Fortunately, [g_0] works most of the time, although I'm
assured that it is actually distinct from [k].


> nowhere near as hard as a uvular trill (which has got to be
> the hardest sound to produce in any language for typical English
> speakers to learn
Well, I suppose I may not be a "typical" English speaker, but the
uvular trill was absolutely trivial for me to learn.   There are
plenty of IPA sounds I *still* can't produce, so it doesn't even rank.

Out of sounds that I've actually had to learn as part of a language,
the unaspirated stops in Russian were among the hardest.  Also
palatalization - I kept overdoing it and saying e.g. [nj] instead of
[J].

I didn't have any trouble learning the Klingon "alien" sounds [G],
[q], [tK)].  The latter is still one of my all-time favorite sounds to
produce.  The [qX] affricate still gives me some difficulty, as do
syllable-final glottal stops. Theoretically I should have already had
[G] from Spanish at the time I started learning Klingon, but I didn't
recognize it as such.

It still takes a conscious effort of will to pronounce [M] and [7]; my
lips are rebellious and insist on trying to round.  (Getting them to
round for e.g. [y] is no trouble at all...)  I have no difficulty with
Spanish [B], but for some reason the voiceless version [P] is
recalcitrant.




--
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>

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