Posted at 2020-10-02
Replying to:
As many of you suspect, I'm a native Russian speaker. It only makes sense to expect me to pronounce voiced alveolar trill [r] perfectly. Too bad, I'm far from being to pronounce this pesky sound.
They say I have rhotacism. There's a similar word ротацизм [rətɐˈt͡sɨzm] that barely no one knows, and word картавость [kɐrˈtavəsʲtʲ] that everyone knows. When I was younger, so many people liked to point out that I'm... uh, rhotatic? Like, ‘Hey, Timur, say please паРовозик тыР-тыР-тыР or александР Родионович боРодач’. Damn, what do you expect to hear, my dears? If you hadn't known already that I'm //rhotatic//, you wouldn't've asked, right?
Even my name has that sound.
When people try to replicate rhotacism, they usually pronounce voiced uvular trill [ʀ]. I'm not sure what I, a real... rhotacist (?), pronounce though. Perhaps, I'm not really rhotatic anymore (and that's why people no longer point it out).
People also like to say that rhotacists must be pre-configured for French phonology because of the way the French pronounce r. Funnily enough, the French usually read r as voiced uvular fricative [ʁ]. That's right, people often joke about things they don't understand. Oh, should I say that French phonology is really difficult for a Russian speaker? I mean, look at the vowel phoneme inventories: /i/, /ɨ/, /u/, /e/, /o/, /a/ (Russian) versus /a/, /ɑ/, /e/, /ɛ/, /ɛː/, /ə/, /i/, /o/, /ɔ/, /y/, /u/, /œ/, /ø/ and nasalized versions of some of them (French).
NB. There are less vowels in some dialects of French. It doesn't matter. The point is that the inventories are different. I still have no idea how to discriminate [a] and [ɑ].
Whenever it comes to France, something goes wrong. What a lovely country.<esc>dd
What I want to say is that we live in a society. A society where they have [r] as a phoneme.
P.S. I like the English voiced alveolar approximant [ɹ]. It's so chill and relaxed. As everyone should be.