Re: Q about /c/

>Last I checked, the Real Academia Española considers the merger of
><ll> and <y> as /j/ ("yeismo") acceptable, even though it's not the
>RAE's home dialect.  However "*yeismo", where the merger is pronounced
>as [j\] or [Z)] or [J\j\] or [dZ)], is considered an "error".  As is the
even
>more widespread practice of "seseo", in which <z> (and <c> before
><e>,<i>) are merged into /s/.
No, they don't (and cannot) consider pronouncing <y>
as [j\] to be an "error" and as [j] to be "acceptable",
because it's exactly the other way round what we native
speakers do: [j\] is the norm, [j] is the foreign-sounding
oddball (except in those few cases where variants of the
same word coexist as reflected in the orthography, e.g.
hierba/yerba, where the hi-form is the preferred one but
in fact the y-form is the most usual one in speech; where
such pairs do not exist, e.g. "yo" and "ya", the forms
"hio" and "hia" are not native pronounciations). [dZ] is
also one of the usual allophones of the phoneme, as are
[J\j\] and [J\], used in the same contexts where b/d/g
are plosive. I'm not sure what sound you transcribe as
[Z)], but [Z] is the usual pronunciation in Rioplatense
dialect (well, it used to be, but seems to be shifting
to [S] among the younger generations), and that 'yeismo
rehilado' is perfectly acceptable in that area.

As for seseo, it's perfectly acceptable in the areas
where it is the norm (which encompass the majority of the
Spanish-speaking world). Not so for ceceo, that occurs
in far fewer areas and is still considered "vulgar".

Cheers,
Javier

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