You there! Watching this video! Say this sentence. Round and round the rugged rock the ragged
rascal ran. No seriously, say it. Because how you say that sentence determines quite
a bit about the way you talk.
Jonathan Ross, for those who don't know him, is a talk show host and TV presenter in the
UK. He's known for many things, including a speech defect. He can't make a /r/ sound
properly. According to the general public, he says /w/ instead. This is a running joke
to the extent that his Twitter handle is @wossy.
That speech defect's got a long history. Elmer Fudd has it -- he was hunting wabbits. If
you want to make a character seem weak or ineffectual, it's a good defect to give them.
Wove, twue wove, as the priest from the Pwincess Bwide said.
But before you laugh at that, here's a test for you. Say that sentence again. I'm going
to cover my mouth this time so you don't get any clues. Pay attention to what you're doing
with your mouth when you make the R-sounds. Okay. With me. Round and round the rugged
rock the ragged rascal ran. Make that /r/-sound. Hold it.
There are two ways of doing this. Number one: it's like a /l/, with your tongue against
the top of your mouth. If you can go a-la, a-ra, a-la, a-ra, and they feel very similar,
you say it this way.
The other way of doing it: it's like a V, /v/, with your top teeth near your bottom
lip. If a-va, a-ra, a-va- a-ra, feel very similar to you, you say it this way.
If you say it the second way: then congratulations. You've got the same so-called speech defect
as Jonathan Ross. And the same speech defect as me. And the same as a heck of a lot of
younger people. There are areas of Britain now where the so-called defective way is now
the majority, particularly among folks younger than 30. Like Invasion of the Body Snatchers,
the change has happened subtly, quickly, and hardly anyone has noticed.
Because to the untrained ear, and even to many trained ears, it sounds exactly the same.
I wondered, as a kid, why I could roll my Rs -- it's because the /r:/ sound is nothing
like the sound I make. If you've always wondered why speakers of some languages confuse /r/
and /l/ -- like Japanese and Polynesian languages -- well, it's because they don't distinguish
between the two. That only makes sense if your /r/ sound really is like your /l/.
The only way you can tell, in my speech at least, is that I overaspirate PR and BR sounds.
Bright. Bring. Brother. There's a pfft of escaping air in "brother" as my mouth switches
from a bilabial stop, /b/ /b/ /b/, to this sound: a labiodental approximant.
Labiodental because it uses lips and teeth, and approximant because they're near each
other but not touching. It's not a W - that's a labio-velar approximant, with the lips close
together and the tongue raised to the back of the throat.
This is the labiodental approximant's phonetic symbol: and when twanscwibing, phoneticians
are using it more and more and more.
If you ask me? It's stopped being a speech defect. It's just an alternative way of making
a sound now. Jonathan Woss was ahead of his time. Which one do you use?
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