Re: Sound changes giving rise to dental fricatives

On Fri, 20 Aug 2004 12:29:23 +0100, Peter Bleackley
<peter.bleackley@...> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       Constructed Languages List <CONLANG@...>
> Poster:       Peter Bleackley <Peter.Bleackley@...>
> Subject:      Sound changes giving rise to dental fricatives
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> What kind of sound changes can give rise to dental fricatives? I can
> imagine [T] arising from [t], [s] and possibly even [f] and [D] from the
> corresponding voiced sounds, but in what environments would this be likely
> (apart from Greece)?
>
> Pete
>

In Castillian Spanish you have /D/ and /T/

For /T/ this came about in Spanish due to a palatalization of /k/
before front vowels. When a glide became involved, pronunciation moved
forward in the mouth producing /ts/. /t/ before front vowels with a
glide following also became /ts/. This /ts/ moved fully forward in
Castillian to /T/.

For /D/ the situation is a bit simpler, intervocalically, written d
became /D/ as well as finally. You can even hear it happen when a word
with initial d (/d/) is pronounced after a word ending in a vowel, it
becomes spoken as /D/.

It seems in Spanish, fricativization is highly common with voiced stops:

Intervocalic b becomes /B/
Intervocalic d becomes /D/
Intervocalic g becomes /G/

(and that my friends is key to sounding more like a native speaker...
fricativizing correctly :))


--
Something gets lost when you translate,
It's hard to keep straight, perspective is everything

- Invisible ink - Aimee Mann -