On 04-10-27 00:07, Richard Wordingham wrote:

> Is the description as a 'laminal alveolar trill' adequate?

I wonder. I can pronounce it without any problems and I can feel, kmore
or less, what my tongue is doing in the process, but the articulation is
so complex that it seems to defy description in customary terms like
"apical" and "laminal". I'm aware of considerable muscular tension in
the tongue tip, which vibrates against the back part of the alveolar
ridge (so the trill itself can be described as apical), while at the
same time the laminal segment of the tongue seems to be somewhat bunched
and pushed towards the prepalatal region, producing a shibilant-type
fricative accompaniment. I have also observed that I instinctively put
my teeth together and protrude the lips to enhance the fricative effect.
I'm not sure if native speakers of Czech do the same, but it just feels
the natural thing to do.

A "fricated trill", then?

> I saw
> some discussion on SAMPA for Czech which suggested that there wasn't
> an adequate symbol, with the result that [P\] was selected, along
> with [Q\] as the voiceless allophone. On the other hand, I can't
> see any discussion rejecting [r_m], where _m is the X-SAMPA
> equivalent of the subscript rectangle. The home page for the
> discussion is http://moon.feld.cvut.cz/sampa/ . Raising (X-SAMPA
> [r_r] ) was dismissed as too inaccurate, though the Unicode(!)
> description of the discontinued IPA symbol U+027C (long leg 'r' -
> see http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0250.pdf ) says that that is
> the preferred representation!
>
> Help!

If lateral fricatives have their own IPA symbols, the fricated trills
would seem to deserve the same. I liked the unaccountably abandoned
longleg "r", and if anybody could think of a nice IPA symbol for its
voiceless counterpart, I'd be quite happy with that. As an alternative
solution, there ought to be a convenient diacritic for secondary
frication, one that could easily be combined with symbols for laterals
and rhotics. Its absence is one more mysterious feature of IPA.

Piotr