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From: iandale@superior.carleton.ca (Ian Dale)
Subject: Re: What's a "retroflex voice"?
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Date: Fri, 14 Oct 1994 14:29:38 GMT
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Hung Jung Lu (hlu@wam.umd.edu) wrote:
: Daniel B Bucher (dbucher@world.std.com) wrote:
: : In article <3768uc$s9c@ia.mks.com>, Rich Wales <richw@mks.com> wrote:
: : >Could "retroflex voice" perhaps mean that the person was singing or
: : >speaking while inhaling (i.e., the opposite of how we normally talk)?

: : Oh! I remember, it's "pulmonary regressive".

"(pulmonary) ingressive" is, I believe, the usual term.

: I see a picture of a curled tongue tapping the postalveolar subzone.
: All you need to do is try to curl your tongue backwards. The book
: mentioned that retroflex consonants are particularly characteristic
: of languages of India. 

I agree. These sounds, particularly retroflex stops, are especially associated
with the Dravidian languages, from which they have spread to the other
language families of the region.

: If I am right, retroflex consonants are also very characteristic of
: Mandarin Chinese (Putonghua). However, retroflection can only happen with
: fricative sounds there. For instance, in Pinyin notation, 's' is
: non-retroflex and 'sh' is retroflex [version of basically the same
: sound.]
 
Again, I agree, especially if we leave out the section I have enclosed
in square brackets.

But back to the term "retroflex voice". I don't know the context this
term came from (I missed earlier postings to this thread), but the
term itself seems an unusual one to me. The only explanation I can
think of off hand is that it might have been used to refer to what is
otherwise referred to as "rhotacization" -- giving an "r-like" sound
to a vowel by keeping the tongue tip curled back during
its production. Many dialects of North American English, for example,
use rhotacized vowels (or simply "retroflex vowels" in words like
'burn' or 'far'. They also often have a retroflex glide in words like
'parrot'.
