It's a slightly different place of articulation. The Arabic <ع> is pharyngeal, while the "R" you are thinking of is uvular.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharyngeal_consonant

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uvular_consonant

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Place_of_articulation#/media/F... (9 vs 10)

Arabic has a sound akin to that, but it's a different (similar looking) letter: غ

There's a decent wiki page on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guttural_R

So yeah that helps me articulate, but I’m still fuzzy on if there’s a different muscle back there that Arabic uses, or if the answer is “yes, it’s a variant on the same thing”?

I’m a bit of a parrot and so sounds I can’t reproduce draw me in like a moth to a flame. The click sound in some African languages and the very guttural singsong of Vietnamese/Thai are my only nemeses... so far.

Ayn is a voiced pharyngeal fricative, ghayn is a voiced velar fricative. My intuitive answer was wrong, I thought the difference was one is fricative and the other is not... at any rate, those are points of articulation, not muscles.

An articulation point is simply supposed to be the place where you put your tongue. In this case it's so far back in your throat, I'm not sure you actually can put your tongue there.

But the muscles are in your tongue, the articulation points are just places in your mouth. Like the palate, for palatal consonants, or lips for labial, in some more familiar examples.

isiZulu / isiXhosa have not one, but three distinct click sounds. I suspect the Khoisan languages have even more.

Not that many more, they mostly only use 4, with 5 in some localised dialects.

No, the rolled R is just a vibration of the tongue against the roof of the mouth.

Yeah I dunno how to tell you this, but those of us who make the rrr sound at the back of our throats roll our eyes at you when your backs are turned.

I can't speak for the other Romance languages, but that's for sure the wrong way to make that sound in French, and a lot of people can't seem to hear the difference.

There's a reason some comedians make fun of european languages by clearing their throats. The rolled consonants are throaty, not mouthy (a word I just made up right now, sue me).

There's a (not so) fine difference between the rolled/trilled R [1] and the guttural/uvular R [2]. The former is indeed produced by vibrating the tongue

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dental,_alveolar_and_postalveo...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guttural_R

I notice you don't link the Wikipedia page about the rolled R [1], probably because it contradicts you. There are many kinds of rhotic trills and the guttural R (aka uvular trill) is one of them.

Another fun trill is the bilabial one [2], like imitating a fart with your lips. It doesn't really qualify as a rolled R, though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolled_R

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilabial_trill

> Another fun trill is the bilabial one [2], like imitating a fart with your lips.

The normal (American) English term for this is "raspberry".

> guttural/uvular

That’s the stuff. Thanks for the vocab lesson. And look at that map. Most of northern and Central Europe is a guttural r.

You trilled R motherfuckers in French class ignored your poor teachers’ pained expressions for years, while the rest of us wanted to go up, pat them, and say it’s okay, we share your pain.

Apparently I have some unresolved hostilities toward some people who got A’s but had disastrous pronunciation.

But do you roll your eyes lingually or uvularly?

It did sort of feel like my eyes were being sucked back into my skull. Maybe nasally? I’m not an anatomist.

>a word I just made up right now, sue me

No need for suing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20289473

It's just a growl, but short and controlled

That’s not far wrong. I was trying to figure out how I would describe it to a new student and “growl” was about the closest I could manage.