Re: /w/ vs /B/

On Jun 5, 2007, at 12:15 AM, Roger Mills wrote:

> 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;
There's also a current slang term <güey> (I've also seen the spelling
<wey> but I assume that's pronounced the same), standard <buey> "ox"
- used to refer to a person (probably male only, but I'm not sure)
either with contempt or with affection, depending on context.

> 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.
What are the possible (allophonic) pronunciations of utterance-
initial <gu>/<w>, anyway? I have this notion that they are normally
[Gw], but that seems strange since I don't [B]/[D]/[G] appear
initially in other cases. You may be right that sometimes they're
[w], though.

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