Re: how I pronounce "r" sounds: a velarized labiodental approximant?
- From: andrew_woode@xxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: 31 May 2005 11:35:40 -0700
Hazhar wrote:
> Disclaimer: I may have made a lot of mistakes in trying to work this
> out as I'm not a "professional" linguist in any way; I'm just an
> amateur interested in language and phonetics whose confused by an
> apparent speech defect I appear to have.
>
> Lately I've been trying to learn how to pronounce the alveolar trill,
> with little success. I can pronounce uvular trills easily, as well as
> all kinds of bilabial trills, but the alveolar always escapes me. I
> decided that if I just take my /r\/ sound, as I assumed it to be, and
> mess around with that, I might end up with a trill. I've been standing
> in front of a mirror, trying to see what my tongue does when it tries
> to pronounce both /r/ and my "normal" rhotic consonant.(does anyone
> else sometimes feel that phonetics is just an excuse to make funny
> sounds?). What I found surprised me. My articulation of the r sound
> seems to involve the tip of my top teeth touching the back of my bottom
> lip, and my tongue assuming a velar position, bunched up at the back of
> my mouth. If I try to keep my mouth open (not allowing the labiodental
> articulation), I get this vague glidey sound that I assume is a velaral
> approximant. If I do the opposite, and don't allow my tongue to assume
> a velaral position, I end up sounding like Jonathon Ross... (for non UK
> citizens: Jonathon Woss is a comedian/pwesenter who is well known for a
> speech impediment that causes him to pwonounce "r"s as "w"s). After
> some experimentation, I realize I am actually, with some effort, able
> to articulate /r\/, although due to my apparent unfamilarity with it it
> causes my speech to sound pretty laborious. I'm left with the distinct
> impression that I have some kind of hidden speech impediment...
>
I am also a BrE speaker (though not Estuarine, more RP) with a
labiodental r - though I don't detect a velar tongue position in my
version. It's hardly a speech impediment when, as in my and presumably
your case, it is acoustically identical with the target sound that
other people use an alveolar articulation to produce. (I caused
confusion when, on a phonetics course, I actually tried to do the BrE
sound in the canonical alveolar fashion and failed - previously, no one
had noticed anything odd about my production. I should just have
carried on with my non-canonical articulation and no-one would have
been any the wiser). It does of course mean there's no easy short cut
to the trills you want, though it didn't stop me acquiring dental
trills as a child for foreign languages - you just have to start from
an entirely different place.
(Mind you, some people do have it tough. I remember someone who found
all /r/ sounds, including her native BrE ones, more or less impossible
- and had the bright idea of studying Spanish and Russian at
university!)
.
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