Re: 3 Phonetics-Related Q's

Quoting Roger Mills <rfmilly@...>:

> As a child, I learned a silly joke/story about a lion named Herbert, the
> main feature of which involved firmly planting the tongue tip behind the
> lower teeth, and then talking.  Everything comes out quite weird, but
> especially the r's, which of course lack the retroflexion-- it makes one
> sound rather British (=silly, in the estimation of US kids, maybe?). Anyway,
> the punch line was "Herbert had burped" ["h3:b3t h&d 'b3:pt] (the [t] in
> Herbert is either unreleased, or more likely [?]).
There's a Swedish children's song about monkeys which is supposed to be sung
with the tongue tip wedged 'tween the lower teeth and the lower lip. I suppose
it includes entire classes of phones unknown to most of humanity.

Boringly enough, the replacement for /r/ sounds alot like [j]. [j] or [j\] for
/r/ incidentally a common feature of "baby speak" in Swedish.

                                                      Andreas