Thursday, June 21, 2018

pronunciation - How do you geminate ら-line sounds?


This is my current understanding of gemination (促音, /Q/, small っ): in native Japanese words, only the following sounds can be geminated: /k/, /s/, /t/, /p/. Additionally, in loanwords we can geminate their voiced counterparts /g/, /z/, /d/, /b/. German loans also give us geminatable /h/. (Separately, we also have moraic /N/, which can precede /n/; and place assimilation of /N/ -> /m/ before /m/.)


This is all well and good, but today I learned that the loanword for "tagliatelle" is written タリアテッレ, with a geminated /r/.



How do you geminate Japanese /r/, which is (at least in my idiolect) a central flap, which doesn't seem to lend itself to gemination?



By contrast, English /r/ is an approximant and Spanish /r/ is a trill, so it's clear how those geminate (just pronounce them for double the usual length), and similarly, all the other geminatable Japanese sounds are stops or fricatives, which also have an obvious way of geminating them.


Audio of a native speaker pronouncing geminated-/r/ words would be very helpful as part of an answer.




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