Re: Q about /c/

>  RM:  No. IPA [c] to me is a peculiar beast-- it's a voiceless stop,
> basically a k but with the central part of the tongue contacting quite
> far forward on the hard palate. Rather like the k of Engish "key".  If
> you can hear any of the IPA websites, it seems in some cases to have a
> bit of a y-like release, similar to but not as noticeable as in
> English "cute".  There is a voiced counterpart, IPA "j with a crossbar",
> roughly like English g in "geese".  Personally I suspect these occur
> mainly as allophones of phonemic /k/ before front vowels, but if there
> are languages where the two are distinctive, I'm sure someone will tell
> us.
Well, yes, of course there are languages where they
are phonemic. Right off-hand:

- Hungarian: spelled "ty" /c/ and "gy" /J\/, e.g. tyúk
'hen', kutya 'dog', gyerek 'child', magyar 'Hungarian'.

- Basque: spelled "tt" /c/ and "dd" /J\/, used mainly
in hypocoristics, e.g. ttantta 'droplet', kuttun
'little darling', Maddalen 'Maggie' (I'm only aware
of _onddo_ 'mushroom' not being a hypocoristic).


>  Spanish <ll> in most of South America is pronounced like English y
> (IPA j), in some areas with a little more friction, XSAMPA "j\" I
> think, and mainly in Argentina as a palatal fricative like French j,
> that is, XSAMPA "Z".
'Yeismo' (merging of <ll> and <y>) is widespread in
all but a few areas of the Spanish-speaking world
(mainly in non-urban areas of Castile and in bilingual
areas where 'll' is shared with the other language,
like Catalan, Quechua and Aymara). But merging them
into [j] happens only in the US by direct influence
of English. Where English is not part of everyday life,
like in South America and Spain, pronouncing the /j\/
phoneme as [j] is a clear signal of foreign accent.
OTOH, you can pronounce it [dZ] and it would sound
acceptable, only over-emphasized when not in absolute
initial or after nasal, where a plosive/affricate (any
of [J\], [J\j\] or [dZ]) is the expected allophone
instead of a fricative ([j\] or [Z]]) (this allophonic
distribution is parallel to that of /b/, /d/ and /g/).

That is, English names like <Jane> and <John> are
naturally rendered by Spanish speakers as what in
Spanish we would spell <Yein> and <Yon>, because for
us English <j> sounds like a perfectly valid allophone
of Spanish <y>. While English <y> is what in Spanish
is pronounced in the first syllable of <hierro> (meaning
'iron') when pronounced carefully so as to distinguish
it from <yerro> (meaning 'err'), but this opposition
is on the wane, only present in a few rare pairs that
nowadays many don't even care to distinguish, so most
Spanish speakers will tend to pronounce English <yet>
and <jet> just the same (both as [J\j\Et], [J\Et],
[j\Et], [dZEt] or [ZEt], none as [jEt]).


>Castilian <ll> is of course a true palatalized [l] similar to
English "million".

Being finicky, not a palatalized 'l' (like Russian l'
[l_j]), but a true palatal 'l' [L]. There's a small
but perceptible acoustic difference between both (the
same as with [c] vs. [k_j], [J] vs. [n_j], etc.)

Cheers,
Javier

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