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Re: Urban lithp mythp (Re: Indo-European question)

From:Lars Henrik Mathiesen <thorinn@...>
Date:Tuesday, June 19, 2001, 20:34
> Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2001 19:42:18 +0000 > From: Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...> > > At 11:50 am -0400 19/6/01, David Peterson wrote: > >In a message dated 6/19/01 6:37:24 AM, thorinn@DIKU.DK writes: > > > ><< How about if he consistently pronounced the unvoiced sound as /s/, and > >the voiced one as /T/? Some people find /s/ much easier to pronounce > >than /z/. >> > > > > No, the *letter* /z/ was supposed to be pronounced [s], not [z]. There > >is no [z] sound in Spanish.
> In modern Andalucian & south American Spanish, yes. But even more telling > against Lars' theory is that the voiced sibilant would change, if it were > going to, to /D/, surely.
If it was really an idiosyncratic change, all bets would be off --- and with no dental fricatives in the system beforehand, there'd be no internal relations to maintain. But yes, I should have checked the actual values of <z> and <c>. My reaction was mainly to the assumption that the king just changed how he pronounced certain letters --- I did not imagine that David had so assiduously avoided exposure to the history of the language he was talking about that he could imagine that <s> and <z> had had the same sound in Castilian before this change, and so I thought it would be enough to remind him of this difference. A mistake, it seems. Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn@...> (Humour NOT marked)