Rusty, I found your comment on the tico r interesting.
Can you give a phonological description of it? Were you able to reproduce it during your stay?
The reason I ask is that I have a text from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Manual de Transcripció fonètica, 1997) in which this particular r found in Costa Rica is equated to the voiced ?, the notoriously difficult rhotic found in Czech. I have always wondered about this, but have never visited Costa Rica to investigate.
It is hard to describe this sound, but it seems to be a fricative that is a simultaneous rolled r and a zh sound. Extremely difficult for foreigners to master, and also difficult for Czech children to learn. The tendency for foreigners is to make a sequence, r.zh, but that is incorrect. It has to be simultaneous. It is cognate with the palatalized r in Russian, ??, which is also a very difficult sound to master (but not the same sound as the ?).
In this text from Barcelona, Costan Rican Spanish was the only language mentioned other than Czech to have this sound.
Here is a voice file with the Czech sound:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:C...nin_Dvorak.ogg