Query Details
| Query Subject: |
learning trills
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| Author: | Julian Bradfield | |
| Submitter Email: | click here to access email | |
| Linguistic LingField(s): |
General Linguistics
Historical Linguistics History of Linguistics |
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| Subject Language(s): |
French
Italian |
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| Query: |
I am one of those unfortunate native English speakers who seems
unable to learn to pronounce [r]. (At least, on good days I can produce a 2 or 3 tap [r] in easy (e.g. intervocalic) positions, but I can't make the sustained trill that should be simple---though I have no problem with a sustained bilabial trill :-) I think this particular mental block is not all that uncommon, so I wonder if any of the colleagues on this list who teach practical phonetics have any helpful pieces of advice on producing this sound: ranging from precise descriptions of the tongue position before the trill starts, to impressionism and tricks. (There was a discussion on the ''vocalist'' list last year, which gave a few singing-teachers' tips, so no need to refer me to that.) If you would like to give any such advice, please send it to me; I will then summarize to the list later. As a sub-question, one of the contributors to the vocalist discussion asserted that there is a significant number of people who are physically unable to produce a genuine [r] as they have ''sub-standard mouths'' (!). This sounds implausible to me: is there actually any wide-spread physical inability to produce *any* common sound? languages like biblical hebrew, ancient egyptian, as well as zulu and swahili, have special forms for modal coordination in sequences: there are two forms, negation is a problem, keying on realis/irrealis distinction, etc. my question, do we not have such robust sequencing with special modal-coordinate forms in other language families around the world? Palmer in his 1986 study of mood only pointed to Fula. thanks. V -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Dr Vincent DeCaen c/o Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations, 4 Bancroft Ave., 2d floor University of Toronto, Toronto ON, CANADA, M5S 1A1 Hebrew Syntax Encoding Initiative, www.chass.utoronto.ca/~decaen/hsei/ Dear Linguists, Does anyone know literature about the phenomenon of ''verlan'' (reverse of syllables, e.g., to cite a French example, bran-che' - che'-bran) in ITALIAN? Perhaps some Italian native speaker remembers the use of such language games or even some examples. Thanks a lot Elmar PD Dr. habil. Elmar Schafroth am Lehrstuhl fuer Romanische Sprachwissenschaft Philosophische Fakultaet II Universitaet Augsburg Universitaetsstr. 10 D-86135 Augsburg Tel.: (0821) 598-5738 (Univ.) Tel.: (0821) 57 29 33 (priv.) Fax.: (0821) 598-5501 e-mail: Elmar.Schafroth.@phil.uni-augsburg.de Internet: http://rzsun2.rz.uni-augsburg.de/~kanada/schafr.htm |
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| LL Issue: | 10.1160 | |
| Date posted: | 04-Aug-1999 | |
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