Re: Sound Change /bs/ > /f/ ?

On 1/17/07, Santiago Matías Feldman <iskun20@...> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> As the title suggests, my question is: Do you know if
> the sound change /bs/ > /f/ exists in any context?
>
> Especially, I'm interested in the context of /bs/
> before another consonant.
I think the change is reasonable, but I think there is room to quibble
with what you are assuming as the input to the rule. You have /bs/,
but it is equally likely that it is /βs/. So it goes like this:

(bs > ) βs > ɸs > ɸ / f

> I'm asking this because I've noticed that my mother,
> being an educated speaker, tends to produce a /f/
> instead of /bs/ in words like "obstáculo" and
> "abstracto", which gives her Spanish language a very
> odd touch when pronouncing that kind of words,
> creating very rare clusters like /ft/.
I just asked a colleague who works in Spanish phonology and
morphology, and he finds that a very understandable pronunciation. He
also offered [apstrakto], [ahstrakto], [awstrakto], and [astrakto] as
alternatives. Apparently all kinds of weird things happen to clusters
in learned borrowings in Spanish.

Dirk