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Re: Q about /c/

From:Javier BF <uaxuctum@...>
Date:Sunday, January 25, 2004, 12:00
> 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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Joe <joe@...>