Dear Piotr,
>
> "Upside down little r" _is_ listed there. See section 3.2.2
Spirants.
hmmmm, I must be going blind--should've listened to my mother and
eaten more Spinach (like Popeye the sailor man, toot toot).
> I suggest that you look up also section 3.3 Laterals again. Perhaps
> you missed your sound either.
I wish I did Piotr. I've just checked and it doesn't seem to list it.
OK, let me go through the list one by one to preclude any more
protests in this quarter:
In 3.3.1: the first one can be ruled out because its unvoiced and I'm
more than sure that my sound (this's getting cumbersome: let's call it
x, à la mathematicians ;), x, isn't what they're talking about. The
second is an alveolar/dental fricative, the description says the
tongue-tip touches the teeth or the alveolar ridge. I've verified it
with one of my Malayali friends and he says it does neither.
In 3.3.2: I can confidently say that I can pronounce all the three
sounds listed here (the palatal being new to me, I'm not sure I got it
right, but I must've come close enough--besides, there's no way I
could confuse it with x, for one thing, in the palatal the tongue tip
is almost on the floor of the mouth).
> BTW, I don't think this group has been concentrated on
> Lithuanian/Polish/Russian. You'll find all sorts of subjects in the
> archive. E.g. it may interest you that American English 'r'was
> explained a few months ago.
I agree, you do deal with quite a broad spectrum here: I just let my
mouth shoot off a bit there (another of foibles which are anything
but).
I hope you don't dismiss my little query as uninteresting (as the
clicks you talked about) or "irrelevant" (whatever that means). I feel
like I'm being excluded from another world just because of this
inability to pronounce what has been described as the subtlest sound
in Dravida.
Yours curiously,
Rohit