@Mitch You're saying it's time to call a spade a spade and an épée a spatha? Any chance you could settle on a gladius instead?
@Mitch That's mostly an Al-Andalus characteristic. It's especially prevalent in Cuban Spanish, exilic or otherwise.
The Andalusian dialects of Spanish (Spanish: andaluz, pronounced [andaˈluθ], locally [andaˈluh, ændæˈlʊ]) are spoken in Andalusia, Ceuta, Melilla, and Gibraltar. They include perhaps the most distinct of the southern variants of peninsular Spanish, differing in many respects from northern varieties in a number of phonological, morphological and lexical features. Many of these are innovations which, spreading from Andalusia, failed to reach the higher strata of Toledo and Madrid speech and become part of the Peninsular norm of standard Spanish. Andalusian Spanish has historically been stigmatized...
> Syllable-final /s/, /x/ and /θ/ (where ceceo or distinción occur) are usually aspirated (pronounced [h]) or deleted. The simple aspiration of final /s/ as [h] occurs in the speech of all social classes within Andalusia, and is the most widespread form of /s/-lenition outside Andalusia. S-aspiration is general in all of the southern half of Spain, and now becoming common in the northern half too.
@Mitch Why are you watching the news in Miami?
See not only "Variants of /s/" but especially "Debuccalization of coda /s/" here:
Some of the regional varieties of the Spanish language are quite divergent from one another, especially in pronunciation and vocabulary, and less so in grammar.
While all Spanish dialects adhere to approximately the same written standard, all spoken varieties differ from the written variety, to different degrees. There are differences between European Spanish (also called Peninsular Spanish) and the Spanish of the Americas, as well as many different dialect areas both within Spain and within the Americas. Chilean and Honduran Spanish have been identified by various linguists as the most divergent...
> In much of Latin America—especially in the Caribbean and in coastal and lowland areas of Central and South America—and in the southern half of Spain, syllable-final /s/ is either pronounced as a voiceless glottal fricative, [h] (debuccalization, also frequently called "aspiration"), or not pronounced at all.
There is an accompanying allophonic chain-shift of the five tense vowels into the five corresponding lax ones where this occurs.
Spanish has only five vowels, all tense. But under debuccalization you get lax allophones shadowing each of these.
"Lazy" allophones if you would. :)
> For instance, todos los cisnes son blancos ('all the swans are white'), can be pronounced [ˈtoðoh loh ˈθihne(s) som ˈblaŋkoh], or even [ˈtɔðɔ lɔ ˈθɪɣnɛ som ˈblæŋkɔ] (Standard Peninsular Spanish: [ˈtoðoz los ˈθizne(s) som ˈblaŋkos], Latin American Spanish: [ˈtoðoz lo(s) ˈsizne(s) som ˈblaŋkos]).
The -s can also be further palatalized even further than in even the normal northern laminar version, coming out as something your ear would pick up as /ʃ/ although it is not such.
This process is normalized in Iberian Portuguese where [ʃ] and [ʒ] allophones are the normal coda realizations for plural nouns.
But it also occurs all across the north of the Penúnsula Ibérica, less noticeably perhaps than in Galego-Portugués.
The Mexican /s/ is the same apical one that we have in English because that's what the Andusians do. But the northern /s/ has a couple variants neither of which is that one.
> One of the most distinctive features of the Spanish variants is the
pronunciation of /s/ when it is not aspirated to [h] or elided. In
northern and central Spain, and in the Paisa Region of Colombia, as
well as in some other, isolated dialects (e.g. some inland areas of
Peru and Bolivia), the sibilant realization of /s/ is an apico-alveolar
retracted fricative [s̺], a sound transitional between laminodental [s]
and palatal [ʃ]. However, in most of Andalusia, in a few other areas
in southern Spain, and in most of Latin America it is instead pronounced
These "alternate /s/ versions" are a cause for infinite confusion by ears naïve to these sounds.
> the sibilant realization of /s/ is an apico-alveolar retracted fricative [s̺], a sound transitional between laminodental [s] and palatal [ʃ]
That's the sound that baffles Merkins.
Retro sounds always baffle foreigners, just as the normal American /r/ does.
Don't even get me started on the retracted Hindi stops.
So in point of actual fact, there are far, far, far more variations going on with phonemic /s/ in Spanish than any non-specialist has any change of imagining in their wildebeest nightmarsh.
@Mitch So saying "let's just all use /s/" neglects this regional and/or allophonic variability that is so great as to make foreigners think different dialects are using different phonemes instead of all /s/ because of such breadth of phonetic variation.
Just figuring out cada version of las casas will break you, even without bringing las cazas into the picture. Happy hunting, mi cazador!
Assuming que tú las cazas muy bien, of course.
Caza cada casa como te dé la gana.
No caste shaming allowed, at least not aloud anyway.
Pearls before swine and whutnut.
Por esta razón la caza del jabalí está permitida durante todo el año y no sólo en casa tuya.
But a javelina is not a jabalí, ¡fíjate!
Cast no javelins before boars.
Next up: cashless caches and cajas and caixas and caisses.
The boar javalí and its feminine javalina are actually from Arabic doncha know: "Del ár. hisp. ǧabalí, y este del ár. clás. ǧabalī 'de monte'; la forma f., de jabalín."
The "javelin" folk mythology for the American peccaries normally called javelinas in English or jabalíes americanos in Spanish is no more than that. The other kind of jabalina used for the Roman javelins and such seems to have been leant to the Spanish by the French javeline. I dunno.
And Hava Nagila is not Jewish Mexican for Have a Tequila, either.
Did you know that fava beans are habas but fairies are hadas?
No hurry, guys, I'll be here all night. The stage is just getting warmed up.
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…
