velar trill (was: ~Yeshuewu)

[Mark Mandel]

On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 7:53 PM, Herb Stahlke <hfwstahlke at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Mark,
>
> I can't get a trill there. Â Could you describe what you're producing?
>
> I'll have to read more Cherryh.
>
> Herb

It took a lot of experimentation and practice, mostly while driving to
work. (A little while ago, while I was writing the previous post, my
wife and daughter both decided they'd had enough and left the room.
It's not a pretty sound!)  I'll try to describe how to get it:

 - Place the dorsum of the tongue against the front of the velum, as
for a fronted [k]. For me this is approx. as in "cute".
 - Retract the tongue slightly (a couple of mm?) toward its root while
keeping the same velar point of contact, sliding the tongue backward
across that spot. If you produced a stop now, it would sound like a
backed palatal.
 - Now tense the tongue where it touches the velum, and lax it forward
of that point.
 - Pulmonically force breath out through the closure. For me,
especially when developing the sound, it took a good deal of effort to
keep the closure tight enough to produce a trill, and a corresponding
effort to force the breath through. I couldn't do it more than a few
times without stopping to rest. Like [x] for an American English
speaker, it got easier with practice.

Mostly I use it at science-fiction events; my daughter, when I produce
it elsewhere, refers to it as "laughing in kifish to freak the
mundanes". ("Mundane" is fannish slang for 'non-fan'.) The "actual"
sound, I think, is a fast chattering of the kif inner set of teeth,
anatomically impossible for humans.

--
Mark Mandel

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