Re: Dublex/Katanda hybrid

>>And why not as a "ae" diphthong, such as that of Latin?
>
>But, conventionally at least, classical Latin {ae} is pronounced [aj]
>(unless adopting the later medieval [e]).   In Welsh, e.g. /ae/ and /ai/
>are pronounced differently, but anglophones certainly find it difficult to
>keep such a distinction.
Neither we Spanish speakers--or at least not me myself.
We have [ai] as a "proper" diphthong, appearing in words,
and [ae] as a diphthong which cannot occur in words
but that is actually pronounced in current speech almost
everytime a word ending in 'a' meets a word starting with
'e'; e.g. "tendrá estrés" sounds as [ten.dr'aes.tr'es],
"tomA Esto" is pronounced [t'o.ma'es.to]--I've changed the
usual place of the stress marker here from before the syllable
to before the peak vowel to make clear that the center of 'ae'
in that case is 'e' and not 'a'; i.e., in Spanish we not
only pronounce differently [ai] and [ae], but also ['ae]
and [a'e]--, etc. Certainly, any Spanish speaker will
notice that the [ae] diphthong resulting from sinalefa in
"tendrá estrés" doesn't sound like the [ai] one in
"tendrá hipotermia" or "aire".


>>I've always wondered why in English-language lists
>>there's kind of a general consensus about geminates
>>being "difficult". I don't think any Finnish or Italian
>>speaker would see anything difficult in them at all.
>
>Ah - something I agree with Javier over!  Count me out of the "general
>consensus".  IMO it's merely anglophonic linguistic laziness.  Not only
>does not Finn or Italian see anything difficult, this life-long English
>also sees nothing difficult.  I quite like geminate consonants.
>
>It occurs to me that Spanish doesn't have them either. Do Spaniards have
>the same apparent aversion to them as English speakers?
Not in isolate words, but they're actually pronounced when
the same consonants meet, e.g. in "el lobo", pronounced as
[el:oBo], "todas son" [toDas:on], "pon nueve" [pon:ueBe]...
That is, we Spanish speakers are not really aware that we
CAN and do pronounce geminates in our language and that's
why I myself found it "hard" at first to pronounce them
in Italian... but of course that "natural" aversion vanished
as soon as I realized that I had been pronouncing geminates
all my life!

Cheers,
Javier

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