kartavnie

[Alina Israeli]

>Question is: what is there about the Russian r and l that makes it difficult
>for some (Russian) people to pronounce correctly?

Well, they are just more difficult to pronounce. Phoneticists recognize
that some sounds are more difficult than others, it's done
cross-linguistically (some Georgian sounds for example would be difficult
for foreigners) and interlinguistically.

R and L sounds are just trickier. Russian R requires flapping about 1.5
times. Flapping in general is difficult, more than once is even harder.
Spanish has R and RR which is difficult for foreigners to distinguish.

L requires to let air latterally (relative to one's tongue).

R is the last sound acquired by Russian children, normally around 3. If it
does not happen, intervention is warranted, and I do not mean surgery,
speech training.

[On a very personal note, I have twins, and one of them appropriately
acquired R at 3, the other did not by 4, so I started doing some word
excercises, by 4.5 she had it. I mean Russian R, they took care of English
sounds themselves.]

>_For the sake of this discussion_ we assume that kartavanie is an
>undesirable trait, and that it is, therefor worth eliminating. (We have
>heard of some parents willing to have their children operated on to
>eliminate the phenomenon.)

I have never heard of surgery. Kartavlen'e of R may take many forms,
grassirovanie, that is using the uvula a la francaise is only one of them
and the most benign speech defect.

>Is the source of the problem physical (shape of mouth, for example), or
>cultural (grew up among Frenchmen)?  Are the people who do it, aware that
>they do?

Growing up among Frenchmen on Russian territory has nothing to do with the
speech defect. In fact, prior to 1917 there was a StPetersburg dialect of
French (and I cannot remember now where I read it, but it immediately made
sense, because my own French teacher spoke it). I believe R grasseye was
not part of it.

(French also distinguish that at one point the current French R was a
defect. It just swept the nation. My dictionary states: "pronociation dite
parisienne, considérée comme un défault quand le R était roulé.)

>Are there similar or comparable lapses in other languages? (I have not come
>across any, but that isn't saying much.)

If we look at other languages, Polish lost the hard L sound in a
traditional way, radio announces were trained to say it while the rest of
the country resorts to unvocalised U as a norm. Same defect is encountered
in Russia, including my own family for example (no, there is no Polish
connection), and I had friends and classmates who pronounce [masua] for
*maslo*.

French spelling leads us to believe that a similar thing may have happened
there at least in some positions. For English *falcon* we have French
*faucon*, for example, and many other such exampled.

The way English actors of Laurence Olivier generation were trained to
pronounce R on screen very similar to what I consider a Russian R, one
might think that in the mind of those teachers the British R was incorrect,
at least for the stage. So they must have had a Russian-like model in mind
when they were doing this. Considering that British R curls, and the sound
of R vanishes in final position and before consonants, one might come to a
conclusion that even curling R is difficult to produce.

__________________________
 Alina Israeli
 LFS, American University
 4400 Mass. Ave., NW
 Washington, DC 20016

 phone:    (202) 885-2387
 fax:      (202) 885-1076 

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