Re: Learning your Rs

1

I had to go see the speech therapist in first grade. I don't remember why. I went with a girl from my class who had a problem with s.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 03-17-25 6:37 AM
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2

For problem unrelated reasons, she got fired by Noem.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 03-17-25 6:42 AM
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3

Isn't your little one a bit young for this movie?


Posted by: Opinionated Michael Madsen | Link to this comment | 03-17-25 6:48 AM
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4

I was surprised to learn that a rolled r comes from the back of the tongue. When an Italian can't roll an r - and there are many - they make a fairly guttural, almost french sounding, r instead.

Anyway, good luck to ace!


Posted by: simulated annealing | Link to this comment | 03-17-25 7:49 AM
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5

I roll my r's at the front! I was taught that a single r in spanish is very close to the d in teddy, and that's the same spot I roll my r's.


Posted by: heebie | Link to this comment | 03-17-25 7:51 AM
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6

I pronounce both ds in teddy.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 03-17-25 7:54 AM
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7

That's just reckless.


Posted by: heebie | Link to this comment | 03-17-25 8:03 AM
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8

Tedďy.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 03-17-25 8:10 AM
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9

Rs are funny. There are a bunch of different ways to make them that don't really seem to have much in common, but somehow the acoustics work out so that they're perceived similarly enough to be considered a single category even cross-linguistically.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 03-17-25 9:08 AM
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10

TETHY.


Posted by: Opinionated Welshman | Link to this comment | 03-17-25 9:11 AM
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4: Depends on the language, right? Rolled R's in French are at the back, and in Spanish are at the front, right?


Posted by: Unfoggetarian: "Pause endlessly, then go in" (9) | Link to this comment | 03-17-25 9:14 AM
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5: Yeah, the unrolled Spanish R is the same sound as the flap in butter, iirc.


Posted by: Unfoggetarian: "Pause endlessly, then go in" (9) | Link to this comment | 03-17-25 9:15 AM
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That makes me think that there must be so many motor and kinesthetic things with a diversity of normal ways to do them!

I remember telling my younger older brother about how I learned there were several different grips for holding a table tennis racket. He replied sagely, "Peep, I learned a long time ago, there's just 2 ways of doing things. The right way and the wrong way."

I think even then young peep knew that was really dumb.


Posted by: peep | Link to this comment | 03-17-25 9:16 AM
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14

[joke goes here]


Posted by: OPINIONATED RURAL JUROR | Link to this comment | 03-17-25 9:18 AM
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15

By introspection, when I pronounce an unrolled Spanish R, my tongue is doing the same flap as in "butter," but there's also some rounding going on in the lips that seems to push the center of resonance forward and make the whole thing more R-like.


Posted by: lourdes kayak | Link to this comment | 03-17-25 9:23 AM
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16

Depends on the language, right? Rolled R's in French are at the back, and in Spanish are at the front, right?

Normatively, the French R is a fricative rather than a trill (so not technically "rolled"), and it is in the back. The Spanish R is trilled and in the front. The German R is a trill in the back, except in Austria and Bavaria, where it's in the front. I don't know about Italian.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 03-17-25 9:28 AM
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17

(This is the sort of thing I meant in 9. Those are all perceived as Rs!)


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 03-17-25 9:28 AM
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18

And the English R is completely different from any of them; it's an approximant rather than a trill or fricative, and it can be pronounced in either the front or the back.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 03-17-25 9:30 AM
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16: When I try to pronounce German, I fail, because I default to the fricative French R in the back when speaking a foreign language.


Posted by: Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 03-17-25 9:31 AM
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20

I remember having to learn all of them in my old-school phonetics and phonology courses. The French one is a uvular fricative, most of the time, I think.

As a Scot, so someone who uses a range of trilled, tapped or approximant "r"s anyway, the only one that's tricky, I think, is the Czech: Ř, ř.


Posted by: nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 03-17-25 9:36 AM
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21

The uvular trill is fun because it sounds like you're trying to seduce a tiger.


Posted by: lourdes kayak | Link to this comment | 03-17-25 9:37 AM
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22

Scottish "r" sounds are the origin of the "purple burglar alarm" meme.


Posted by: nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 03-17-25 9:37 AM
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23

one of my favorite linguistics terms is "R-colored" as in "R-colored vowel" (because a proximal R changes the sound of the vowel)


Posted by: E. Messily | Link to this comment | 03-17-25 9:55 AM
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24

We weren't allowed to study phonics in school because of the danger of addiction.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 03-17-25 10:03 AM
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25

Presumably a lot of that "perception" is downstream of using the Latin alphabet. If they didn't all evolve from roughly the same phoneme, an independent alphabet might have assigned them differently.


Posted by: Minivet | Link to this comment | 03-17-25 10:07 AM
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26

23: so is the OP accurate??


Posted by: heebie | Link to this comment | 03-17-25 10:12 AM
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23 refers to vowel articulation being affected by R, not R articulation* being affected by vowels, but yes.

*RRRRRticulation


Posted by: E. Messily | Link to this comment | 03-17-25 10:23 AM
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28

hoorrrrrrrrrray!


Posted by: heebie | Link to this comment | 03-17-25 10:26 AM
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29

I find it very counterintuitive that my tongue is retroflex to make an English R. It does not feel like that's what I'm doing.

I love these videos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8yysjQeYT4


Posted by: E. Messily | Link to this comment | 03-17-25 10:35 AM
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30

Tongues are wild


Posted by: E. Messily | Link to this comment | 03-17-25 10:36 AM
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31

Piercing one seems risky. It's a muscle or a bunch of muscles or something. It's not just skin and goo like earlobes.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 03-17-25 11:21 AM
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I'm pretty good with the Spanish 'r' and seem to have been fine with 'r' sounds in German, Italian, and Russian. But I can't get the French 'r' right and not being understood when I knew the words I was trying to say really sapped my energy for trying to get better at speaking French while I lived in France, and I was only in France to learn French.


Posted by: fake accent | Link to this comment | 03-17-25 1:50 PM
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16 is a helpful rundown, thanks teo. I learned Russian first and did a tap like people are describing the r in spanish. But it always felt fake to me. I remember another American student exaggerating his rolled r for me, but I couldn't figure out how to do it.

It was only moving to Italy that I learned that you need to stiffen the tongue in back to get it to roll in front. But I can't do it in the middle of words, even with 'grazie.' So I default to that light touch at the front of the tongue, like in butter. But this is decidedly not what Italians do when they can't roll an 'r.' They do something that sounds "fricative" as teofilo put it, which is why I think of the Italian r as starting in the back of the tongue (even if the roll is in fact at the front).

I'm also told my american r's in English sound exaggerated to an Italian. I have come to appreciate the softer english (nationality) r, but I still sound very murican. In Italian people can tell I'm an english speaker but they often guess English not American.


Posted by: simulated annealing | Link to this comment | 03-18-25 1:52 AM
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18. I can't do an English "r" at the front palate without contortions my mouth into an uncomfortable snarl. It comes out like "z" or a trill. Can you ask Ace's therapist how it's done.


Posted by: chris y | Link to this comment | 03-18-25 12:26 PM
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