I didn’t says always!
It also goes the other way: all thru the nite.
This depends on what universe you’re in. Rick and Morty once moved with the family to a dimension that is like ours in every way except that they pronounce “parmesan” as “par-mee-zee-an”.
https://rickandmorty.fandom.com/wiki/Parmesan_Dimension
Several English dialects have a retroflex approximant (the typical “American” R).
Thinking /ʒ/ while in the position for /ɻ/ works pretty well for me to produce /ʐ/.
I only recently (though my best friend) was turned on that joke. I love it because it suggests that universe spells it the way I always want to spell it. That /ʒ/ makes me think it should be spelled parmesian.
That sounds like someone from an Ohio suburb.
Parmesian would not be so wrong if only the place in Italy was named Parmes or Parmesia.
I would pronounce “parmesian” /paɻ ‘mi zjən/.
(Maybe /paɻ ‘mi ʒən/, but certainly I’d accent the second syllable.)
As an English person I, and everyone I know, pronounces it parm-e-zan - we don’t pronounce the last syllable zhan. It’s probably an American thing.
/ʐ/ is retroflex—tongue curled upward, pointing toward the roof of the mouth. The tongue position for /ʒ/ is the same as for /ʃ /.
Retroflex consonants are not very common in general American or standard British accents.
The “typical” American rhotic consonant is more alveolar /ɹ/ rather than retroflex.
A little bit of research shows that the American R is generally post-alveolar (somewhere between alveolar and retroflex). We’re both wrong!
Still, I think saying “zh” from the position of an American R yields a pretty good approximation of /ʐ/.
What are the most widely-known languages that use that sound?
The already-posted link (thanks, Discourse) Voiced retroflex fricative - Wikipedia has a list, but several of these seem to be cases where it’s an allophone of /ʒ/ or dialectal or otherwise not consistently understood as retroflex. Russian, Polish, and Spanish, for instance.
Then what’s the point of using such a specialized symbol? You might as well use /ʒ/.
I see what your saying. What I was thinking, and didn’t articulate well (or at all; I’m sick and my head weighs 372 pounds) was an exaggerated American R, already post-alveolar, like a stereotypical pirate “ARRR”, would move the tongue back into a retroflex position. From there articulating a “zh” would get us the appropriate sound.
Indeed, I think to most Americans, the Chinese “zh” sound sounds a lot like “rzh”.
I tend to view these things from the perspective of how I would teach a student to make that sound (I teach voice) and that’s how I’d do it. Not that my American students are clamoring to sing that much Chinese rep. My Chinese students do, but they don’t need my help
Well, as a matter of natural human language functions, most of us cannot distinguish sounds that we didn’t learn as phonemes during early language acquisition. So most of us can’t distinguish most close pairs of sounds that have symbols in the IPA.
So there’s nothing wrong with not hearing the difference between ʐ and ʒ. I probably couldn’t except in very isolated conditions, intentionally trying to hear the difference.