analytical versus inflected languages

[Mike Salovesh]

Paul Frank wrote:
>
> From: Grant Barrett <gbarrett at MONICKELS.COM>
> > Now for something completely different.  Why do some native
> > speakers of
> > Spanish, when speaking English, substitute the "y" sound for the
> > "j" sound
> > (e.g. "Ayax" for "Ajax")?
>
> I reckon that it's because nothing remotely resembling the English j sound
> exists in Spanish, whereas the Spanish and English y sounds are quite
> similar. I'm a native speaker of Spanish, by the way, and I don't substitute
> the y sound for the j sound when speaking English. I'm glad you said some
> native speakers of Spanish.

I agree that standard Spanish does not use the "English j sound". The
sound does occur, however, in some variants of Spanish spoken in
southeastern Mexico and Guatemala.  These variants ("dialects") are
heavily influenced by languages of the Mayan family.

It's possible that some of what you hear reflects a spelling
pronunciation whose roots go back to orthographic changes in the early
1500s.  16th century Spanish spellings used "j" and "x" in several
conflicting ways to represent Nahuatl phonemes.  In some cases both
letters represented the same phoneme: witness "Mexico" and "Mejico", for
example.  In other cases, one letter -  often "x" -- stands for
different phonemes in transcriptions by different hands. "Tuxtla", a
widely recurring place name, is a good example.

"Tuxtla" is a loanword from Nahuatl. Its spelling shows several places
where there are clear contrasts between Nauhatl and the Spanish spoken
by the scribes who recorded Nahuatl names for places conquered by the
Spanish.  (I'll use traditional two-letter combinations for Nahuatl
phonemes here, and for visual clarity I'll separate each phoneme from
its neighbors by spaces.) The original Nahuatl source for "Tuxtla"
combines /t o ch tl i/, meaning "rabbit", with
/- tl a n/, a locative roughly equivalent to "place of". Regular
morphophonemic rules for combinations produce /t o ch tl a n/.

Side note: The Nahuatl phoneme I represent here with /o/ is a back vowel
of some sort. Some 16th century scribes represented the phoneme with "u"
rather than "o". The Nahuatl phoneme, however, was not equivalent to
either of those Spanish vowels. It's closer to the u of English "such",
"much", etc. (The alternation of "u" and "o" may also represent dialect
variations within Nahuatl.)

Spanish words do not have consonant clusters of /ch/ plus /t/ or /tl/.
Modern pronunciations of Tuxtla have at least four phonemically distinct
variations.  Orthographic "x" in this word can stand for /-k s-/, or
/-sh-/ (as in English "ship"), or /-s-/, or /-ch-/.  I have heard
different people use each of the four possibilities while visiting
Tuxtla Gutierrez, Chiapas.

Spanish speakers who come from Mexico might, therefore, be expected to
find the appearance of two problematic letters in the spelling of a
single word to be particularly troublesome.  That would be perfectly
consonant (! - pun not intended) with a reading pronunciation.

-- mike salovesh                    <salovesh at niu.edu>
PEACE !!!