Return of the minimal pairs

[Rick Mc Callister]

[snip]

	Runa, I've been told, had a three vowel system and, as I've been
told, there has been a great degree of mutual influence between some Runa
dialects and and local forms of Andean Spanish.
	In addition, in many regions of Latin America --especially in rural
areas, there is confusion between unstressed /i/ & /e/ as well as between
unstressed /o/ & /u/. My personal guess is that is mainly due to Portuguese
or transitional forms of western Ibero-Romance.
	Rural Mexicans and Mexican-Americans are especially noted for this,
even though, according to Luis Cabrera's Diccionario de aztequismos,
Nahuatl has a 5-vowel sysem exactly like standard Spanish.
	Something analogous to "vellam non villam" occurs among rural Costa
Ricans, who often pronounce closed syllable /e/ more like /ei/ as in
/ereyDja, ere:Dja/ for the toponym <Heredia> /ereDja/

>>The e/i vacillation is very common, in many IE dialects, but also in the rest
>>of the world, e.g. among Quechua housemaids in Peru: they always speak about
>>'me premo' (mi primo, 'my cousin', a eufemism for their lover) when speaking
>>Spanish. They also interchange o/u, like in 'me pichu' (mi pecho), another
>>common thing anywhere.

>I don't know anything about the phonology of Quechua, so I can only guess
>that these vacillations probably represent the misfit in sound-ranges
>between vowels in Quechua and Peruvian Spanish. What Varro noted was a
>different phenomenon involving closed syllables in native speech. I suspect
>what he meant by "vellam non villam" was that the "rustici" used an open [I]
>in closed tonic syllables where "urbani" and "suburbani" had a closed [i]. A
>parallel is provided by the American English rusticisms "britches" for
><breeches> and "crick" for <creek>.

>DGK

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701