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

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
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likehsna rtem zuv tikuhnuh auag inuvuz vaka'a.

A word is an awesome thing.