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

> 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)