Re: y sound

Stone Gordonssen <stonegordonssen@...> writes;

> >I won't argue figures, but most Spanish speakers don't distinguish y and
> >ll, and the pronunciation for ll (and y)
> >in most of South America is [j]. [dZ],[Z] and [S] are mostly heard in
> >Argentina and Uruguay.
>
> Having followed this string, my question is:
> Do any of these variations lead to problems of unintelligability across
> Spanish-speaking communities?
Not that I'm aware of. The lack of distinction between the
underlying /L/ and /j/ does produce orthographic confusion.
Uncountable children write |haya| 'there be' (subjunctive)
as |halla| 's/he finds'. Same goes for /s/ and /T/ ("z").
But I'm having trouble finding minimal pairs to test
intelligibility. "Llena" and "hiena" would have to do,
but "hiena" is [jena] everywhere, curiously. However,
ask anyone to write |utensilio| -- in Argentina almost
everybody writes "utensillo" and says [utEn'sij\o].

In Argentina there might also be minimal problems with the
pronunciation of the trilled "rr" in some northern provinces,
which is almost unvoiced and with friction. To illustrate the
point, consider this: I work with a doctor that was born in
Tucumán (north-west part of the country). Her last name is
Carrizo. She talked to some patient's relative and told him
to note down her name and send the patient the next day to
the hospital in order to talk to her personally. The next
day the patient arrived at my desk with a piece of paper
with the doctor's name written on it: "Calliso". :)


--Pablo Flores
  http://www.angelfire.com/scifi2/nyh/index.html
  "Your freedom justifies our war."
    (Niccolò Macchiavelli -- slightly paraphrased.)