Of course the apical rhotic that is
essential to a passable English accent is the untrilled continuant (written
as upside-down "r" in IPA) -- that is, unless your chosen model is a
slightly overdone variety of Scottish English. A brief course in practical
phonetics often works miracles in apparently hopeless cases -- as I know from
first-hand experience, having taught English and general phonetics to several
groups of first-year students.
If "guttural" has a technical meaning at
all, it means "concerning the back of the mouth or the throat", and refers to
such places of articulation as velar, uvular, pharyngeal or glottal (these
precise terms are of course preferable). In its popular non-technical
meaning the word describes a vague range of auditory impressions and
means something like "harsh, grating" or just "foreign-sounding,
incomprehensible". I've often seen Polish and other Slavic languages described
as "guttural" for God knows what reason. Dammit, despite my uvular [R] I don't
get inordinately guttural even after a few vodkas ;-)
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, June 25, 2001 4:00 PM
Subject: [tied] Re: uvular R
One of the joys of being Danish is that I don't have to
pronounce an apical /r/ which I am incapable of (at least the trilled version)
for whatever reason; the closest I get is a right-side (dextro-?)lateral trill.
Since I've never had to pronounce it before I learned English at school (at
about the same time I started breaking fluorescent
tubes for fun on a nearby
garbage dump) I don't know for certain when I acquired this
incapability.
But I have wondered whether the to non-linguists so
important concept of "guttural" has anything to do with it?