Re: NATLANG: What's the sound of Castilian <s>?

on 12/6/03 9:15 PM, Mark J. Reed at markjreed@MAIL.COM wrote:

> I have a coworker from Pamplona and I can't quite make out the
> sound of his <s>es when he speaks Spanish.  It's definitely
> "softer"/more palatalized than [s], but I don't think it's [S];
> it might be [C].    I was wondering if anyone on here knew what
> it was most likely to be, assuming his speech is typical of that area?
>
> -Mark
This reminds me of my Structure of Tagalog class, when the second native
speaker whose speech we were transcribing had something like [s\] wherever
we had written [s] for the first one. We were greatly befuddled until he
acknowledged that he had a lisp. Maybe your coworker has a lisp, unless
you've heard him use [s] in English. Or you may just be hearing the apical
[s_a] or [T] as the others suggested.

--
Josh Roth

http://www34.brinkster.com/fuscian/index.html

"Farewell, farewell to my beloved language,
Once English, now a vile orangutanguage."
-Ogden Nash