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Re: English l and Spanish ll

From:Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>
Date:Tuesday, November 9, 2004, 15:00
> Adam Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious <AczJ5@...> wrote: > >Also, is the Spanish ll (in the accents where it sounds similar to /dZ/) > >/z*/ or /L/?
Definitely not [L] in those dialects. I believe [L] is the Madrid pronunciation, and therefore the official one of the language as standardized by the Royal Academy, but it doesn't sound anything like English [dZ)]. Across the Spanish-speaking world, |ll| is probably the most variable of all the Spanish sounds, but almost all of the values you find for it are in the "Palatal" column of the IPA chart, and specifically in the right-hand (voiced) half of that column: [L], [j], [j\], [J\j\)]. To English speakers, [L] sounds a lot like the sequence [lj] run together ("lli" in "million" is the canonical example); [j] sounds just like the English "y" in "you"; [j\] sounds like [Z] ("s" in "measure"); and [J\j\)] sounds like [dZ)] ("j" in "job"). All of these equivelances (except [j] = "y") are only approximations, however, since the other sounds don't appear in English. Not only the phonetic realization but also the degree of phonemicity varies; in some dialects, |y|, |ll|, and prevocalic |i| (which is almost always [j]) are all pronounced differently; in other dialects, two of those three are grouped together while the third is different; and in yet other dialects, all three sound the same. -Marcos