Re: y sound

Jessica Hus?n scripsit:

> > But in Castille it is still pronounced /L/ (the lateral
> > palatal approximant).
>
> According to my teacher in Spanish Phonetics, ll is
> pronounced as y by 98% of the people who have
> Spanish as their first language.
Yes, lleismo (keeping y and ll as distinct phonemes) is dying out even
in Northern Spain, and in the South (and consequently in the colonies)
it never existed.  But the domination of yeismo (y and ll are the same
phoneme) does not mean that that phoneme is everywhere realized as [j],
a normative palatal approximate.  Frication is very common, and so is
a shift to palatal-alveolar forms like [Z] and [z\] and even [S] and [s\].

I love these Spanish words: yeismo/lleismo, ceceo/seseo, tuteo/voseo,
leismo/loismo, ....  Does any other language have anything like them?

--
[W]hen I wrote it I was more than a little              John Cowan
febrile with foodpoisoning from an antique carrot       jcowan@reutershealth.com
that I foolishly ate out of an illjudged faith          www.ccil.org/~cowan
in the benignancy of vegetables.  --And Rosta           www.reutershealth.com

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