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.




Since OP asked me in [another
thread](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/12906/when-does-r-become-
a-trill/12910#12910) to post this here, I'll start with what I think of the
sound used by the native speaker in the video.

The Italian word "tagliatelle" pronounced by native Italian speakers sounds to
the Japanese like タリアテッレ, タリアテーレ, タリアッテレ or something along those lines (or it
does at least to me). So I'm guessing that the Japanese guy in the video is
simply mimicking the Italian sound within the Japanese phonology. So, his /r/
there may not be representative of natural Japanese.

In any case, if it is a trilled /r/, I guess you can analyze the /rure/ part
as one "syllable" /rre/, i.e., it contains a trilled /r/ with some sort of
gemination. But as a native Japanese speaker, I'd say it's just two moras ルレ
said quickly. At least my brain hears it that way, regardless of how the sound
is being realized by his mouth.

Also, usually it's not difficult to realize a geminated version of a phoneme
like /r/ in a given phonetic/phonological context. If it is a consonant that
is not usually geminated in Japanese (as in a loanword like this case), you
just come up with an analogous 促音 sound on the fly so it flows best. You can
even make a 促音 at the end of a sentence, where there's literally no sound to
stretch out. The mechanism is explained [here in the Japanese Wikipedia
article on 促音](http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%BF%83%E9%9F%B3).

In your case, if a Japanese person who has never heard タリアテッレ (or tagliatelle)
in their life is to pronounce it as a loanword they just ran into (e.g., it's
written on a menu this way in katakana), it'd be something along the line of

[code]

    　リアテッ    
    タ  　　　　  
    　　　　　レ　　(← This final mora is lower in pitch than タ.)
    
[/code]

with the required pitch drop at レ for pitch accent and gemination on /r/ the
same way as you'd do on some other phoneme. I'm pretty sure the vast majority
of the native Japanese speakers understand what _タリアテッレ (テにアクセント)_ should
sound like, although there can be variations. Personally, I seem to realize 促音
for this particular word (in this kana spelling) by the following method
explained in the Wikipedia article:

> 次の側音の構えのまま声門を閉鎖する無音状態とし、声門を開放すると同時に次の側音を発する。

So, what I'd do is basically to first make a glottal stop while placing my
tongue in the regular /r/ position), hold it by one mora, and then realize /r/
in the normal way. Probably this can depend on other factors like how quickly
I pronounce it. But with this pitch pattern (which I think is the natural
choice for many native speakers), I seem to use the glottal stoppy version.

**Edit:** I can't seem to correctly align the kana above in the pitch accent
description; the preview looks fine, but when it's posted, stachexchange
renders it differently than what I'm seeing in my preview... Anyway, レ at the
end should be lower than タ if said in isolation.

