Re: THEORY: Spanish was Re: THEORY: Storage Vs. Computation

Barry Garcia <Barry_Garcia@...> wrote:
>
> pbrown@polaris.umuc.edu writes:
> > But it can't quite top what I've heard
> >of Porto Rican. I've had PR teachers and classmates, and they tend to lose
> >almost every "s" going: los castellanos = loh cahtellanoh; and my
> >favourite, Christmas = Crihmeh.  We used to joke that they pronounce the
> >first and last sounds of a word or phrase and that everything in the
> >middle was compacted into an unanalysable consonant cluster.
>
> God, i would have a hard time trying to understand that! It was hard
> enough trying to understand the video with the sevilleno! I have also
> noticed that Spanish of the Latin American countries tends to be a bit
> harder than Castillian Spanish. Castilian Spanish is a little softer and
> sounds a little different ( those of you who have heard it know what i'm
> talking about). I do also like the Argentine way of pronouncing elles and
> y as a "zh" sound (i have noticed this with some Colombianos).
Carlos will surely tell us whether that's true (I think he did
once). In Rioplatense (Argentina, but not all of it) <ll> and <y>
are fricative, but I think they're unvoiced /S/ "sh", not voiced,
and not exactly like English "sh" (I'm pronouncing it right now
trying to get the difference, but I can't...). What I've heard
(outside Rioplatense) is that some people pronounce the trill <rr>
as a fricative quite similar to /Z/.

I don't know if it's harder or softer. Castilian seems a bit more
complicated phonetically. It has /l_j/ (<ll>) and /T/ (<z>, <c>) and
/j/ <y>, which we don't have. Try to pronounce _descender_ /dEsTEn'dEr/
correctly in Castilian Spanish: you have a difficult /sT/ cluster which
I personally find very harsh (and such clusters are quite frequent).

The main thing about Rioplatense is to drop or simplify syllable-final
sounds. The syl-final sounds /s/, /f/, /x/ become /h/; clusters are
simplified (Castilian /sT/ > /ss/ > /s/, etc.). The final -r of verb
infinitives is often lost... I think I read a famous linguist saying
that American Spanish has a tendency to the simplest possible syllable
pattern (CV).


--Pablo Flores