Re: Chinese Dialect Question

Roger Mills <romilly@...> writes:
> JS Bangs wrote:
> > .... This actually poses a question: In those dialects
> > of Spanish that have a vowel quality difference in closed syllables, does
> > the first syllable of /perro/ behave differently from the one in /pero/?
>
> Non-native speaker says, no, and suspects the word is syllabified pe-rro;
> both would have the more open [E] allophone that occurs before a rhotic.
Is that really so? [E] in an open syllable?

I may be influenced by this thread, but I *think* I pronounce
the /e/ in |pero| a bit tenser and higher than the one in |perro|.
I know that I read about this somewhere (in a text about phonemic
distinctions using this very same pair of words).

Having gemination as a feature just for this pair of phones seems
a bit inadequate IMHO. |Perro| is definitely syllabified |pe-rro|,
even if it's the anomalous form [pEro].

This thread needs an urgent subject change...

PS (long):

After some searching about, I found a text with a list
of Spanish words with intervocalic /r/ that are not
Latin in origin, but borrowed from Celtic and Iberic
tongues and Basque.

 aquelarre
 arroyo
 barranco
 barro
 becerro
 cencerro (Basque _zinzerri_)
 chamarra
 chaparro (Basque _tsapar_)
 chaparrón
 charro (Basque _tsar_)
 cigarra
 gabarra
 morro
 pizarra
 socarrar

The text also claims that many words beginning with /ar/
in Spanish, with an original root that really begins in /r/,
are the result of a (very old) substrate influence, and
mentions the fact that Basque uses a prothetic vowel to
support an otherwise initial /r/, as can be seen in Spanish
loans /arasa/ <- Sp. 'raza', /arosa/ <- Sp. 'rosa' etc. This
phenomenon produced such Spanish lexical items as 'arruga',
'arrepentir', 'arrancar', 'arrebatar' (there are no modern
related words without the prothetic /a/, that I know of,
except for 'rebato', which in turn is only used in a fixed
phrase 'tocar a rebato'... so it gets a prothetic /a/ anyway).[1]

All of this could help explain why Spanish rhotics are somehow
anomalous (or difficult to categorize alongside those in other
Romance languages). While |rr| in original Latin words was a
geminate, there are many modern |rr|'s that are definitely from
different sources, and unrelated to the flapped |r|.


[1] Speaking of which, does anybody know whether there's a
relation between English 'raze' and Spanish 'arrasar' ('raze,
destroy, devastate')? I know 'raze' <- Old French 'raser'
= 'scrape' or 'shave'...


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