Re: Sound changes giving rise to dental fricatives

On Fri, 20 Aug 2004 04:50:15 -0700, B. Garcia <madyaas@...> wrote:

>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 :))
It seems to me that Spanish has fricatized medial voiced stops due to the
following:

- Medial consonants are not as marked as initial or final consonants.

- In an earlier period of Spanish, intervocalic voiced stops, being less
marked than initial or final ones, were pronounced less distinctly in rapid
speech.  That is, the flow of air came to cease being completely stopped,
but rather merely constricted.

Interestingly, the phonological development from Vulgar Latin to Modern
Castilian Spanish includes consonant gradation, similar (but not the same)
to that of Finnish: intervocalic VL /d/ >> 0, /g/ >> 0 (I think), /b/
>> /B/ (or /v/?), /t/ > /d/ > /D/, /k/ > /g/ > /G/, /p/ > /b/ > /B/.
- Rob