Re: Request for help, Spanish
| From: | Christophe Grandsire <grandsir@...> |
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| Date: | Monday, October 11, 1999, 7:08 |
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Nik Taylor wrote:
>
> I'm currently working on Lunj (<Lunis < Luna + -is), the official
> language of the Pan-Human Republic. It is descended from a
> Spanish-lexified creole, with substrate influence from English and
> Esperanto (a language spoken in a number of Lunar colonies), and
> probably other languages. Now, the questions I have are these:
>
> What is the distribution of the allophones [a] and [A] in Spanish? And
> do all dialects have those allophones?
>
I'm pretty sure that Castillian doesn't have those allophones, but it's
the opinion of a non-native speaker that hasn't spoken Spanish for more
then three years now, so don't take it for granted. :)
> What are the pronunciations of {ll} and {y} in different dialects?
> Particularly in Mexican dialects.
>
I know that {ll} is pronounced [l_j], [j] or [S] and {y} is pronounced
[j] or [i]. I don't know about other pronunciations.
> One sound change involves the loss of intervocalic voiced stops. Now,
> in words like "ciudad", this would produce [sju'a] (I think, or is it
> [sju'A]?). What should I do with those kinds of words? Ordinarily,
> unstressed high vowels become glides when prevocalic, but *[sjwa] would
> be impossible. Would it be reasonable for that to become a rounded
> glide, that is [s;ha]? Or would it be reasonable for an epenthetic [w]
> to be added, creating [sju'wa]? Or should I just leave it at [sju'a]?
> Or, might the [j] be vocalized, creating [si'wa]?
>
I like [sju'a], but it depends on how far in future you want to put
this language. [sju'a] is more likely to be recent than old. For an
older stage of the language, I'm thinking of something like:
[sju'a]->[Su'a]->[Sua]->[Swa]. The change [sj]->[S] is very likely to
happen IMHO, as it generally happens also synchronically (try to
pronounce very fast a word with [sj] -I can't come up with one at the
moment-). In fact, I even think that it could happen at the same time or
even before the loss of intervocalic stops, so [Su'a] would be more
likely than [sju'a], even at an early stage of the language.
--
Christophe Grandsire
Philips Research Laboratories -- Building WB 145
Prof. Holstlaan 4
5656 AA Eindhoven
The Netherlands
Phone: +31-40-27-45006
E-mail: grandsir@natlab.research.philips.com