Re: Spanish education

>From: "Karapcik, Mike" <Karapcik@...>
>
>Out of curiosity, what about pronunciation?
Yes, Mike. There are strong differences. But they are sounds you cannot
confuse like it might happen in other languages. I will try to explain
without using IPA because I am not fluent in it.

A word like "pasión" (passion, in English) will be pronounced by a guy from
Madrid using a sound for the letter S close to "sh" in "she". A Venezuela
will pronounce S like in "see". But both sounds are completely
understandable and do not lead to any confusion.

Letter Z -and also C before "e" and "i"- are pronounced -by people from
Spain- as you said, like "th" in "thing", but pronounced more or less like
"s" in "see" by latin americans: this is a major distinction.


>I know that in Castilian, the "z" is usually pronounced /T/ and the
>"ll" used to be pronounced "lj" (as the Catalan L-dot is still pronounced).
>My Spanish teacher was from Madrid, and so I started to imitate this
>accent. (I love the /T/ and /D/ sounds, so it was "nicer" for me. However,
>I was told I sounded like a pofta.)
I guess they told you that!!! It is very funny (at least for me) to listen
foreigners speak Spanish with castillian accent. Spanish accent sounds very
funny to our ears (and I have to say that same thing happens on the other
direction).

>If I remember correctly, different South American dialects from the
>Andes region keep the "ll"=/lj/. Also, I was told by someone who spent a
>year in Argentina that their "j" is pronounced /Z/.
Correct. The argentinian and uruguayan accents are very, very strong and are
very easy to distinguish from other accents. I listened to the sound files
by Pablo Flores (a very smart and prolific argentinian conlanger who
introduced me to this list). When he reads his texts in his Draseléq
language, his argentinian accent can be perceived even from the moon by a
spanish speaker.

As you know, plural in Spanish are made by adding an "s" to the end of words
finishing by vowels a, e and o, and by adding "es" to the rest. Well,
Venezuelan accent just drops the final s of any word and "s" in the middle
of words, when another consonant follows, is pronounced like "h" in "hot".

The melody is very different from country to country and even in the same
country. In Venezuela only, I can distinguish, at least, 7 different
accents. When american friends try to speak to me in Spanish, I gently
decline because venezuelans speak very fast. Mexicans and Colombians tend to
speak slower, so they are easier to be understood.


>One of the best happened to an ex-friend of mine.
yes, it happens all the time. It is almost impossible to be away from that
kind of situations.

It is great to share this with you.

Antonio

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