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Re: Emphasis allophonies?

From:FFlores <fflores@...>
Date:Friday, September 17, 1999, 2:48
Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...> wrote:
> FFlores wrote: > > Nice example: > > > > Nos fuimos. [noh'fwimoh] 'We went.' > > No fuimos. [no 'fuimoh] 'We didn't go.' > > > > In a particular tone, those two are virtually indistinguishable! > > Does your dialect not use the allophone [O]? I know I've read that some > dialects of Spanish have made that into a phoneme by losing the /s/, > making <nos> into /nO/ (from [nOs] > [nOh] > [nO])
Come to think of it, I don't know! As Boudewijn once said, it's difficult to carefully analyze the sounds of your own language. I think there's definitely a phonetic contrast in normal speech, but whether it remains depends on intonation. Usually in _nos fuimos_ the pronoun is clitic and unstressed, but in _no fuimos_ the negative _no_ has a clear secondary stress. However, in certain environments, some people will cliticize _no_. This must be happening since a long time ago; by this time, /s/ > [h] has been lost altogether like you mention, and the [O] has become [o] since it stood in a now-open syllable. --Pablo Flores