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

The only time I've ever heard Mexico pronounced with /S/ was once outside Mexico
City during the last full solar eclipse, when a bunch of New Age types dressed
in white stood on top of some ruins and chanted Mexico with /S/, better to
commune with the former indigenous inhabitants and their sun god I suppose. I
found it an amusing sight. The eclipse was cool though.

-Weiben

On Wed, 20 June 2001, Dan Sulani wrote:

>
> On 20 June, Nik Taylor wrote:
>
> >Raymond Brown wrote:
> >> Hence the old {Mexico}
> >> [mESiko] >> [mexiko] and got respelled in Spanish, tho not elsewhere, as
> >> 'Mejico'.
> >
> >It's still spelled México in at least some parts of the Spanish-speaking
> >world, including Mexico itself.  I know that Spanish Spanish uses
> >Méjico, and I *think* that most of Latin America uses México, but I'm
> >not certain on that.
>
>     I checked today with two Spanish-speaking co-workers,
> both from Argentina, and they told me that they would spell it  Méjico.
> Their pronounciation of it, to my ear,  was something like
> /meCiko/, /C/ being a voiceless palatal fricative
> ("c cedilla", code U+00E7 ).
>     What's interesting about this, is that upon seeing me trying to
> listen carefully to the fricative, they (who have no linguistic training
> that I know of)  tried to be helpful and explain
> what the sound was. They _explained_, in Hebrew, that they used
> a  /x/  (velar fricative)  as in Hebrew. But they _pronounced_ it
> again and again with a /C/ (palatal fricative)! Talk about the
> influence of the lang that you are speaking at a given time
> upon your perception of what you think you do, even in your native lang!
> (Let alone listening to yourself actually do it!)
>
>
> Dan Sulani
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
> likehsna rtem zuv tikuhnuh auag inuvuz vaka'a.
>
> A word is an awesome thing.