Re: Q about /c/

Trebor Jung wrote:
 Is the phoneme /c/ (palatal stop) that 'hard /j/-sound' that I've heard is
found in Latin American (Castilian?) Spanish, spelled as <ll>?

 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.

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

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