Reddit reviews Sounds of the Worlds Languages

Ladefoged and Maddieson, The Sounds of the World's Languages, pp. 216-217 address this question. They find that the rhotics "form a heterogeneous group from the phonetic point of view", but that "phonologically ... they tend to behave in similar ways".

You may be able to view the relevant pages in Amazon look inside.

Hi,

Linguistics is awesome :)

Stuff I'd recommend:

"Language: The Study of Speech" by Edward Sapir. It's old, but it's a classic. I think it's a good introduction to the "mindset" of a linguist. Also available online. http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/12629

For historical linguistics, I used Adorno as an undergrad:

http://www.amazon.com/Historical-Linguistics-Cambridge-Textbooks/dp/0521291887

There's a more recent book by the late, great Larry Trask (hmm, would like a copy!)

http://www.amazon.com/Trasks-Historical-Linguistics-Robert-McColl/dp/0340927658/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1228341596&sr=1-1

Trask is a very accessible writer, IMHO one of the best paths into linguistics:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_1?_encoding=UTF8&search-type=ss&index=books&field-author=R.L.%20Trask

"Language: The Basics", in particular, would be a great way to start.

For phonetics, I'm a fan of:

http://www.amazon.com/Sounds-Worlds-Languages-Phonological-Theory/dp/0631198156

Which is a tour of every language sound on the planet. But I believe Ladefoged (also great, and unfortunately also late) has a more basic introduction to phonetics and phonology out there... again, you can't go wrong with his stuff.

When you start talking about syntactic theory, you're really getting out of my own area of experience, because I never liked all that stuff! The problem is there's so damn much of it, and I am unqualified to point you in a particular direction.

For me, the single most revealing course in my undergraduate career was a project to describe the phonology of a language I didn't speak. I really regret that I didn't have time to do a proper fieldmethods course and actually analyze the grammar and vocabulary of a language as well. But I do it all the time on my own.

I think it was Mary Haas that said something like "You're not a real linguist until you've written a grammar and a dictionary." By that criterion I'm no linguist, but the point is clear enough: don't be afraid to investigate real linguistic data on your own, with or without a theoretical framework.

Anyway, have fun!

I borrowed this book at the main city library in Copenhagen 20 years ago. It even had the same cover photo!

It was pretty good -- and it was specifically targeted at English speakers, so they could understand the phonetics as well as possible.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/Books/Phonetics-pelican-original-J-D-OConnor/0140215603/ref=la_B001H9PH92_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1482498278&sr=1-3

It covered lots of stuff found in other languages (pretty sure French was one of them) but it didn't target French specifically. It concentrated on teaching basic phonetics to English speakers using English examples. You will learn that you didn't understand English nearly as well as you thought and you will realize that you pronounce many words different from what you think. You will also learn the International Phonetic Alphabet (+ the well-thought out system behind it). Please give up completely trying to use American based "phonetic" writing. There are many different American systems and they only really work for (American) English and they are not particularly well thought out.

Oh -- you will also learn the difference between long vowels and diphthongs. Many native English speakers think all diphthongs are long vowels and that's a big impediment for learning new languages. Don't trust your primary school teacher: English does not have short and long vowels. It has short and long vowels PLUS DIPHTHONGS.

(It also has triphthongs and semi-vowels but you'll learn all that from the book.)

I used to own this book but it disappeared on me more than a decade ago. It was a wonderful tour of common and not so common sounds in languages from around the world. The various ways r's can be pronounced ("rhotics") gets a complete chapter on it's own -- both because it is a really big topic and because there are so many different kinds of r's.

There are actual x-rays and line drawings based on x-rays for all the sounds. I think there are also sonograms (fourier analyses of sounds). Plenty of very good explanations.

https://www.amazon.com/Sounds-Worlds-Languages-Peter-Ladefoged/dp/0631198156

I have read many other books/papers on phonetics but those are the two that I can remember off the top of my head that are also relevant to you. I mean, I could also mention Gunnar Fant's work on machine analysis of speech or Eli Fischer-Jørgensen's book in Danish but that wouldn't really be useful...

Btw, while you are at it, you should probably take a look at the l sounds as well. You are probably making them wrong, too, if you are American. Plus, see if you can learn to relax the soft parts at the back of your mouth. Tensing the muscles there is what gives Americans a lot of their American accent.

109 comments and nobody has mentioned "The Story of /r/", which directly answers your question? Nor Ladefoged's discussion of it in The Sounds of the World's Languages?


EDIT: Short story is that rhotics (1) act like they're the same thing in various languages (for instance, the same phoneme might be realized as a tap in one environment and a uvular fricative in another), and (2) form a sort of cline, where the far ends (voiceless apical trill, voiced uvular fricative) seem very different, but each intermediate rhotic is very similar to the next closest, either phonologically or articulatorily, or both.

I don't think it's necessary, no. But if you're the kind of person that benefits from this kind of thing, it can be beneficial. Sorry for being tautological =)

If you was about to learn new swimming styles, are you the kind of person who would go to the library and research on books about sports science as applied to swimming? If learning the guitar, do you brush up on music theory and try to understand the patterns of notes and chords in the fretboard? Before reading poetry, do you study about metrical forms and the history of styles? If you're that kind of person, you might have fun studying some linguistics and then trying to apply it to the languages you learn. Ocasionally it might even be useful!

As for book recommendations, I think one of the most useful areas you can investigate is phonetics and phonology, the study of linguistic sounds. Spoken languages are made of sounds that you hear, and you decode writing into sort-of "mental sounds" (assuming you're not congenitally deaf). Unfortunately these two processes have complications.

• Adult non-natives often fail to perceive and produce sounds in the new language (L2) that aren't present in their mother tongue (L1).
  
  Due to personal experience, I'm a supporter of the theory that this can be remedied by explicitly learning to notice the different sounds (Schmidt's Noticing Hypothesis). That means you need to understand how you yourself produce linguistic sounds, so that you can adapt your vocal gestures to those of other languages.
  
  To be able to do that, first of all, you have to learn the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). No, seriously, you need it. The Wikipedia articles are quite decent, and so is IPA's own handbook. Wikipedia also has recordings for all sounds—and so does this interactive table. Some beginners think of IPA as a writing system, and try to learn to "read" it as a whole. This is a mistake. Think of it as a table of possible sounds, classified on various dimensions (in the case of consonants, which are easier to introspect, there are three: place, manner, and voice). Once you understand how each dimension explains part of a gesture, the values of each symbol become a recipe of how to produce it: do this with my tongue here, turn on voice, and… voilà!
  
  If you're familiar with language X, look at the Wikipedia article "Phonology of X", and try to refer to the table and understand it by reproducing the sounds. (In the case of English, be sure to locate your own dialect/accent). Then try to understand the corresponding articles for the languages you're learning. You don't need to care about the rest of the table.
  
  As you get familiar with the IPA, try to learn the basics of articulatory phonetics and phonology. Online articles are probably good enough to help with language learning, but if you like technical books and want to dig deeper, I benefited a lot this and this and this one. If and only if you like physics, then this too.
  
  
• It's nontrivial to deduce the sounds from the writing (witness how much trouble computer people have with speech synthesis). All writing systems assume that you already know the language. Some assume just a little, like Finnish or Czech (and are therefore foreign-friendly); and some are basically unpredictable, like English and French; most are somewhere in-between.
  
  The best solution to this is to make sure you get lots and lots and lots of exposure to the spoken language. If you can learn the spoken language before writing, so much the better (it's how natives learn, after all). If you're curious about how writing systems work, I'd recommend Rogers as a first stop, but I think the Cree/Blackfoot sillabaries shouldn't give you any trouble.
  
  

Here is the mobile version of your link

The Sounds of the World's Languages by Ladefoged and Maddieson. You can also find audio of many of the sounds they bring up here.

The UCLA Phonetics Archive is also a fantastic archive of audio examples. You can hear all of the clicks in !Xóõ!