Brunnen

r, r, r and r

My native language is Finnish, and people can still guess that when I speak foreign languages. Even though I've improved my pronunciation, I still make some obvious finno-ugric mistakes when I get tired and don't care too much about the correctness of consonant pronunciation.
In most indo-European languages, like German, English, Swedish, Portuguese, Russian (especially Russian!), there are lots of sibilants. In Finnish, we've got only one, the "simple" s (close to the s in the word some). Well, this has changed recently, partly because most people are quite good at foreign languages, and they do pronounce the word "shoppailla" (go shopping) as the sibilant sh in English. But at the same time, it is no problem for Finns to get the point of any phrase that originally includes s but has replaced that with another sibilant.
"Shateesha shaa juoshta vapaashti" (You can run in the rain freely) means exactly the same as "sateessa saa juosta vapaasti". The latter one is correct.

It seems like most languages in Europe don't allow such free usage of any sibilant. There is a clear difference between "shore" and "sore".

But how about the letter r? Even the English-speaking world has many variations of it. "Could you bring my car back?" said by an English person, an American, an Indian and a Frenchman sounds different, but it is still the same phrase. Everyone can understand it. In the German-speaking word, all the choice of the type of r you use tells about you is where you geographically come from.

For a long time I believed there would be no such language that combines different r-sounds. I found that thought rather surprising. There might be over seven different sibilants in one language, and only one type of r! Why have some languages taken the "art of playing with sibilants" to so extreme that my ear cannot even separate the sounds, whilst others survive well with one single s? (And this is again a very very narrow-minded perspective, I aknowledge) When I met a girl from Croatia I soon noticed it would take longer than a day until I would learn to separate all the sibilants she could pronounce so perfectly.

Three weeks ago I then finally found a language that in turn has variation in the r sounds - Portuguese! That was amazing news. And technically, I had to undergo some training before being able to pronounce a sentence containing both types of r without unnatural pauses. I found a really tricky one to practice, right from the map of Lisbon: Rua do Terreiro do Trigo. You should pronounce the r in Rua as the French do, the double r in Terreiro as the French do, the ro as the Italians do and Trigo as the Italians do. That's a real puzzle, but it serves as a great example of the art of mixing different r-sounds together.

If anyone knows a language that combines the soft American r, the Italian/Spanish r, the what we call in Finland "throat r" (the French one) and the Japanese one that sound like l and r together, please let me know!

posted by Anicko @ 5:52 AM