velar trill (was: ~Yeshuewu)

[Herb Stahlke]

Thanks.  I shudder to realize that I'll be spending part of my
retirement practicing this.

Herb

On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 8:31 PM, Mark Mandel<thnidu at gmail.com> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Mark Mandel <thnidu at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      velar trill (was: ~Yeshuewu)
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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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