/zh/ replacing /dzh/?

[Mark A Mandel]

On Wed, 25 Sep 2002, James A. Landau wrote:

#In a message dated 9/25/02 3:27:43 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
#mam at THEWORLD.COM writes:
#
#> Jesucristo, no "h". Spanish is more sensible than English that way.
#
#Yes.  Typographical error on my part.  "Jesucristo" is correct.
#
#However, not for the reason you suggest.  In Spanish "ch" is
#considered to be a single letter and is always pronounced /tsh/.
#Greek "ch" as in "Christian" is always rendered "c" in Spanish.
#
#As for being "more sensible", the reason is that there exists the Spanish
#Academy which issues strict rules on spelling.  Their policy on spelling is
#to keep things 100% phonetic, e.g. Greek "ph" is "f" as in "tele/fono".  The
#only variation from 100% phonetic that I know of occurs in the New World,
#where the letter "x" can vary from its Academy standard, e.g. "Me/xico" is
#/'me hee co/ no /'meks ee co/.

Yes, all of that is what I meant.

"100% phonetic", though, cannot survive a few centuries of dialectal
divergence. I have seen (but cannot cite) plenty of examples of native
hispanophone phonetic misspellings, with e.g. ll/y/i/hi swapping places.

-- Mark A. Mandel