7.
Trills again – and /r/
Lots of people (here in Taiwan, anyway, and probably
others whose native language is trill-less) seem both fascinated and frustrated
by trills. One day after class a student came up to me on the stairway
and asked, "How do you make a trill?" I asked her if she knew the
Chinese folk song, "Flower Drum Song" 鳳陽花鼓. Part of the chorus goes
(in Pinyin): drrrrrrrrrrrrrr ling-dang-piao-yi-piao 得兒....鈴鐺飄一飄! If you
do the drrrrrrrr 得兒 right when singing this song, you can do an alveolar
trill! The student tried it, it worked, she smiled and thanked me, and rushed
off to her next class.
But what if you don't get the drrrrr
right? Some former students have suggested a method they read on the NTU BBS that
they say really helped them learn the alveolar trill. In short, in addition to
the "Flower Drum Song" trick, the post suggests trying to push the back
of your tongue against your velum in order to relax the tongue enough so it can
go into free vibration. This may not be the way you make a trill once you have
mastered it, but it has helped some poeple to successfully produce their first
trill. Here's the original BBS post.
Here's a LINGUIST post on the same topic.
One contributor suggests rapidly reading a short sentence with words containing
the American tap, e.g. "I edited it". Link to read other ideas on the
subject:
http://linguistlist.org/issues/12/12-57.html
The
best way I know of to learn a uvular trill, sometimes called a 'burr',
is by practicing gargling 漱口. This sound occurs in the speech of some
older speakers of Northumbrian English (spoken on the northeastern coast of
England), but it is dying out. Here is a page from the BBC's "The Routes
of English" on Northumbrian English; it includes a short clip with several
"Northumbrian burrs":
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/routesofenglish/storysofar/programme3_1.shtml
Listen
(MP3) to the uvular /r/ in some Dutch words (source);
though when
the /r/ is word-final, it tends to be an approximant, and fronted.
Here's
short piece on intrusive /r/ in American dialects (see paragraph two):
http://www.bartleby.com/68/1/3401.html
We've finally worked our way up to chapter eight,
acoustic phonetics, so the next page is on:
Fundamental
frequency and harmonics