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Igel

(36,365 posts)
2. I think Wiktionary's right.
Sat Feb 10, 2018, 04:48 PM
Feb 2018

German /r/ in initial position is a uvular fricative. Flip that R upside down.

Uvular trills are vanishingly rare. Last I hear some dialects of Swedish used them and some language in Malaysia or Indonesia. It's likely that they were transitional between a dental trill and the uvular fricative (I think), but a lot of people really have trouble with them and they're very, very poorly attested. Wiki has a slightly different list (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uvular_trill); what I remember is from UPSID in the late 1990s. It pays to not consider extreme versions of the sound to be normative--in the right circumstance a native speaker might pronounce the fricative as a trill; but I've heard speakers of languages do strange things when being especially emphatic, with ejectives and implosives or aspirated consonants popping up in languages without either.

A uvular trill and a dental trill are very, very similar to my ears. I perceive the uvular trill to be a bit sloppier, a bit less sharp (to use an old phonological feature) and with less lateral frication. I'd record and embed spectrograms but my PRAAT knowledge wasn't great and is now in complete disrepair. I've never heard a native speaker of a language variety with a uvular trill. Note that I've learned some French, some German and a bit of Arabic and Portuguese, and they all had uvular fricatives. With Arabic, of course, the one that didn't have the fricative as a reflex of an originally dental trill.

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Wiktionary IPA symbol R is messed up. [View all] Lionel Mandrake Feb 2017 OP
Long, long time since taking Phonetics . . . Aimee in OKC Feb 2017 #1
I think Wiktionary's right. Igel Feb 2018 #2
That's good to know. Lionel Mandrake Feb 2018 #3
Latest Discussions»Culture Forums»Languages and Linguistics»Wiktionary IPA symbol R i...»Reply #2