Re: Two meanings

"John Cowan" <cowan@...> wrote:

> It's the Spanish (Castilian) /s/ that's unusual; it's an apico-alveolar
> sound rather than the general lamino-alveolar [s] that Italian (and
> many other languages) use.  Basque writes "s" for the apical sound,
> "z" for the laminal one.
Yes, but Borges was contrasting the non-Castilian, Rioplatense /s/
(laminal) with the Italian /s/. I don't know how they differ. Judging
by what can be heard on Italian TV, it's somewhat sharper (dental?).
Maybe Borges was referring to the fact that Carlos Argentino Daneri
pronounced his syllable-final /s/'s clearly, while the typical Rioplatense
speaker either turns it into [h] or drops it entirely.

At the time when Borges wrote, the reference to the "Italian S" was
probably understood by many, given the vast quantities of first-generation
Italian immigrants living in Argentina.


--Pablo Flores
  http://www.angelfire.com/scifi2/nyh/index.html
  "I cannot combine some characters [...] which the divine Library has
   not foreseen and which in one of its secret tongues do not contain
   a terrible meaning. No one can articulate a syllable which is not
   filled with tenderness and fear, which is not, in one of these
   languages, the powerful name of a god."
                           -- Jorge Luis Borges, _The Library of Babel_

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