s > r (Spanish)

[Alan R. King]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Roger Wright wrote:
>----------------------------Original message----------------------------
>
>
>And in Spanish, including the most pompous and high-class registers in
>which dropping final /s/ would in general be seen as unacceptable, a
>word-final -/s/ before word-initial rolled /r/- just isn't pronounced at
>all: "los reyes" as [lor'ejes]. (This is also normal in the rare cases
>of what looks from the spelling like word-internal /sr/; thus "Israel"
>as [ira'el]). In the light of this continuing discussion, I'm now
>wondering if this /s/ has assimilated rather than dropping; before
>any other voiced consonant it would indeed assimilate, by voicing, "los
>malos" as [lozm'alos] (but [lozr'ejes] with [z] isn't normal).
>                                                        RW
 
I don't have any systematic argument to back this up, but as a
"second-language" Spanish speaker of over twenty years' standing (and a
linguist, though not a phonetician, residing in a largely
Castilian-dominated country), it had never occurred to me before to "hear"
these pronunciations as anything other than assimilations or /s/ to the
following /r/.  And while I only speak from intuition and impressions, I am
almost certain that the pronunciation of such /sr/ phoneme sequences as
those mentioned by Roger Wright is something different from (and
phonetically more complex than) a single trilled /r/; the phonetic
representations [lor'ejes], [ira'el] etc. feel wrong (to me): something's
missing in them.  Or is this merely because I know how they are spelt??
 
Would I be saying something totally absurd if I suggested that the
assimilated /s/ in these contexts is more like a "rolled [z]" than a normal
Spanish /r/?
 
 
Alan R. King, Ph.D.
alanking at bigfoot.com
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