More on dental fricatives

[Eduard Selleslagh]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Larry Trask" <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Sent: Tuesday, November 07, 2000 7:22 PM

> Given our recent discussion of dental fricatives in English,
> I'm hoping it will be interesting to mention a curious fact
> about dental fricatives in Basque.

[snip]

> Now, northern Castilian has another well-known feature: word-final /d/
> is pronounced as a voiceless dental fricative, theta.  Words like
> <Madrid> 'Madrid' and <red> 'net' are thus pronounced in the north
> with final theta.  Few of these words were borrowed into Basque in
> the past.  When they were borrowed, Basque, which tolerates no
> word-final voiced plosives, did interesting things to them.  For
> example, 'Madrid' is in Basque <Madril>, with a legal final /l/.

[Ed Selleslagh]

But the Castilian adjective is 'madrileño'. Interesting isn't it?

On the other hand, I often hear an edh in 'Madrid', 'laúd' etc. Or is
there something wrong with my hearing ?

> But today Castilian has a number of acronyms, and some of these
> acronyms end in the letter D.  An example is <UNED>, which is the
> Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distancia.  Naturally, northerners
> pronounce these too with final theta.

> But now comes the interesting bit.  When these acronyms are used
> in Basque, they are frequently pronounced with final theta!

> So, even though Castilian theta is never taken into Basque as a
> dental fricative, which Basque does not have, Castilian word-final
> /d/, which is locally a phonetic theta, is taken into Basque as
> a dental fricative.

> This is a pretty little phonological problem, don't you think?

[Ed]

Probably they are just using the Spanish pronunciation. The same thing happens
with English computer terms in Western languages.

Note that there are virtually no monolingual Basques left, so the necessity to
convert the phonemes (OR 'phones??´) when borrowing may not be so strong any
more. What do the French Basques say, who don't speak Spanish? THAT will be
interesting!

> The observation was made by J. I. Hualde, who reports it in an
> article in Folia Linguistica 27 (1993).

> Larry Trask