Re: /w/ vs /B/

I've heard ['awa] _agua_ both on film and from Spanish
speakers living in Sweden, so apparently there has since
Roman times been a trend towards a single phoneme realized
as [gw] initially (and after /n/ in some areas) and [w]
intervocalicly.

The course of events seem to me to have been:

1. originally there was a [gw] ~ [Gw] alternation as a part
    of the [g] ~ [G] alternation, itself a part of the
    general [voiced stop] ~ [voiced fricative] alternation.
2. [Gw] was simplified to [w] -- a trivial
    articulatory/perceptual phonetic change.
3. Other instances of [w] which never were /gw/ were
    identified as /gw/.

Note that words that utterance-initially would begin in [gw]
would begin in [w] utterance-internally when following a
word ending in a vowel, so there would be a surface [gw] ~
[w] alternation observable to learners to generalize from.

Moreover it is probably no coincidence that the same
development took place in Welsh.

Hmm, perhaps Rhodrese has a slang term _gof_ 'head' or
'testicle' derived from a dialectal/sociolectal
pronunciation of _huof_ 'egg'! :-)

_Ai, elle me caltxay nil ghef!_

Roger Mills skrev:
 > A little late but...
 >
 > Henrik Theiling wrote:
 >> Roger Mills writes:
 >>> And even still in novelists' dialect imitations (perhaps
 >>> substandard?)-- hueso ['weso] 'bone' ~ güeso ['gweso],
 >>> huevo 'egg' ~güevo. One even finds "güeno" for bueno.
 >> Aha! For Germanic loans, I knew this shift, but the
 >> native Romance shifts are new to me. Fascinating.
 >> Especially how /o/ first breaks into /we/ and then moves
 >> further to /gwe/. So /o/ > /gwe/ is perfectly feasible.
 >> :-) (And so seems /bo/ > /gwe/.)
 >
 > Not so sure I'd call it a "shift", as it seems restricted
 > AFAICT to those three words; it's almost a writer's way of
 > saying "this person is a peasant or low-class" or
 > something. I don't recall ever seeing, for ex., güestro
 > for vuestro. But it's true that the Spanish /w/ in the
 > diphth. (in initial position at least) and in borrowed
 > words has a strong velar component.
 >
 > Then there's the delicacy spelled "guacamole" pronounced
 > [waka'mole], I'm not sure which one is correct/corrupted.
 > There may be a relationship with aguacate 'avocado'. Ult.
 > < Nahuatl or other Mexican language.
 >
 >
 >
 >
 >

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