kartavnie

[colkitto]

Regarding the French "r", there's an excellent book by Richard Runge, ca.
1973, on Germanic r (you have to read the book for the relevance, it's well
worth it)

Apparently Lenin kartavil na r, which was seen as a speech defect similar to
the English subsitution of "w" for r, e.g., Woy Jenkins

Several important varieties of English do trill r, for me that was one of
the least difficult Russian sounds (much less so than manipulating hard and
soft l, at first). It's very tricky if you don't have it - I've had some
difficulty when teaching it, as instinctively I can't see a problem, and
really have to try and imagine a situation where someone  can't pronounce
it.

Scots Gaelic often confuses l, n.r (to take two examples, in a famous poem
Culloden is called Cul-Lodair), and iolair is cognate with orel, etc.)


>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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