Spanish /ll/ --> /ly/ --> /y/

[D.B. Olson R.]

Very interesting.   Perhaps she was married to a "Colombian" man, but there
is NO variety of Colombian Spanish that has that pronunciation.  But this
may just go along with other questionable things about her that annoyed
you.  "v" and "b" are both the same phoneme, but would normally be
pronounced as a bilabial fricative except after nasals and after pause when
it is usually a bilabial stop.  Any other "hard" pronunciation would be
very strange.

David B. Olson
Universidad Antonio Nariño
Santa Fe de Bogotá, Colombia

At 17:52 20/07/2001, you wrote:
>Interesting bit: One of my high school Spanish teachers (who was married
>to an upper-class Coloumbian man) forced us all to pronounce /ll/ & /y/ as
>/zh/. Pronouns came out: zho, tu, el, ezha (sounds almost exactly like
>Asia) etc.  She drilled it into us that this was the "Columbian Way".
>
>I didn't notice anything with /rr/ or /s/ but one last thing: she always
>gave her "v" an overly hard "b" pronounciation.  She annoyed me.  I saw
>her at the bookstore last night.  She still annoys me.
>
>-dsb
>Douglas S. Bigham
>Southern Illinois University - Carbondale