s > r: Iberian miscellanea

[Alan R. King]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Referring to my subject line "r and s: Galician", Brian Mott wrote:
 
>----------------------------Original message----------------------------
>The change of s to r before another consonanant is widespread in southern
>Spain and also in Madrid, so that los dedos may be articulated as lor
>dedoh and buenos dias as buenor diah.
 
True, and quite a well-known fact (to me and presumably to some others in
this discussion), but the language spoken in southern Spain and also in
Madrid is not Galician, but Spanish (Castilian).  I thought I was
broadening the discussion.
 
This is not to deny (indeed, it's surely all part of the fun) the potential
relevance of the fact that both Galician and Castilian, besides sharing a
common inheritance from Latin, are undoubtedly co-members of a linguistic
area, that of the Iberian Peninsula, which arguably even includes Basque, a
totally unrelated language, as Larry Trask will testify.  But in an "areal"
context it is all the more to the point to label the particular languages
(or even dialects) we're talking about.  The point of my posting was that
(a part of) GALICIAN has rhotacism TOO.
 
Also in reply to my posting, Miguel Carrasquer wrote:
 
>And in dialectal Mallorqui' too.  Same rules as in Galego and Sardo
>(es bisbe "the bishop" > er birbe).
 
Agreed.  What strikes me as saliently different between the Galician and
Mallorcan cases is not the similar rhotacism "rule" per se, but the
respective overall phonologies that are the contexts, and which contrast
fairly radically.  Je m'explique.
 
In Galician words can normally only end in a vowel, /s/, /N/ (velar except
under assimilation), /l/, /r/ or /z/ (voiceless interdental fricative or
voiceless sibilant, depending on dialect); for word-internal syllables the
situation is more complex.  But my point is that the range of CC sequences
is somewhat limited, especially across word boundaries.
 
In Catalan (of which Mallorcan is a dialect), on the contrary, word-final
consonants are notoriously frequent (for a Romance language), resulting in
a wide range of CC sequences across word boundaries.  Now within Catalan,
one of the salient phonological hallmarks of Mallorcan is the strong
tendency to assimilate, delete or otherwise modify the first C in just such
CC sequences, to a much greater extent than in peninsular Catalan (and
inevitably still greater than in non-Catalan Ibero-Romance, where most such
sequences are not found - at least across word boundaries - in the first
place).  Thus the s > r rule in Mallorcan is merely one of a long list of
such sandhi rules, a mere leaf on the tree, so to speak.  In Galician the
same s > r process occurs, but attracts more attention, if you will,
because there's no corresponding "tree".  Relevant or not to the present
discussion, I'm not sure; but maybe it's better to have too much
information than to risk missing a significant insight because of
incomplete data.
 
Miguel also responded to my more recent posting, this one concerning
Castilian and itself in response to Roger Wright's observation about what
we could call, without prejudice for the discussion and our possibly
different analyses, the sr > rr issue (in "Israel", "los reyes" etc.).
Firstly, Miguel, the transcription [lor'ejes] is Roger Wright's (see his
message), I just copied it, non mea culpa.
 
Secondly, my intention was to support Wright's hypothesis (that here we may
have, not dropping of /s/, but assimilation, complete or partial, of /s/ to
following /r/); and I even coincide with his strategy in arguing for this,
namely to build on the fact that in such forms [s] is not pronounced even
in those varieties (and registers) of Spanish where wholesale loss or
modification of syllable- or word-final sibilants is NOT the general norm
in the first place.
 
Apart from agreeing, I attempted to up the ante by expressing my surprise
that anyone could suggest otherwise, since in my (non-specialist,
impressionistic and spontaneous) perception the /s/ segment in question, in
the Spanish varieties in question, is not dropped, it's just realized as
something other than [s].  I repeat that I can't swear by this, nor prove
it, it's just a subjective feeling.  If you like I can restate my feeling
by saying that I intue that in pronunciation, "Israel" still contains a
consonant cluster of some sort.  So the /s/ has partially assimilated, in
my opinion; it isn't simply lost.  I agree.  If the textbooks say it's lost
here, I wasn't aware (I do not specialize in Castilian, it's just a
language I speak every day).
 
The Basque Country is one area (partly) in the Iberian Peninsula where, in
contrast to large regions of the peninsula, we can generalize (at least in
synchronic terms) that final or preconsonantal consonants in general and
sibilants in particular do NOT drop, nor do they get aspirated, rhotacised,
or changed into anything other than sibilants.  This statements applies to
both the indigenous language, Basque, and to the Castilian spoken in the
part of the Basque Country that is also part of the Iberian Peninsula, but
for the present discussion I am focussing on the latter.  I shall not go
into whatever qualifications might be in order for Basque, which could
include comment on Miguel's point about ezta = ez da, because it would only
lead us up a side track.  However I must qualify the Spanish side of my
statement in a way that may be pertinent: in the Castilian spoken here, and
as far as I know in most other places where Castilian is spoken and
sibilants generally maintained, and for that matter in the Basque spoken on
the southern side of the Pyrenees too, _pace Carrasquer_, sibilants are
generally VOICED preceding any voiced consonant.  I also believe this to be
true of the other Romance languages in the Peninsula.  Consequently I am
surprised, and indeed puzzled, by Miguel Carrasquer's statement:
 
>Spanish /s/ is very
>very reluctant indeed to become voiced [it rather becomes [h] or [r]
>than [z]], and a word like <asno> for me is always [asno], never
>[azno].
 
In this respect, what is no doubt special about Castilian (together with
Basque) vis-à-vis perhaps most other Romance languages in or out of the
Iberian Peninsula (exceptions are Galician and Romanian) is that these
languages have no PHONEME /z/ (voiced sibilant), hence Castilian speakers
do not PERCEIVE voiced preconsonantal /s/ as a "z"; it is a mere
conditioned allophone which, in my experience, normal untrained native
speakers are absolutely unable to perceive (just as they can't perceive the
difference between fricative and plosive allophones of their voiced stop
phonemes).  They say, indeed, [aZno] (with an "apical" Z in some varieties,
naturally) for /asno/ "donkey", just as southern Basque speakers will
normally say [eZne] for /eSne/ "milk".  (On the other hand I have heard
[eSne] from northern Basque speakers, providing a very neat "control group"
as far as the Basque data is concerned.)
 
So, back to rhotacism.  Whatever may happen in other parts of Iberia
(particularly in regions where syllable-final /s/ is in general unstable),
in "Basque Country Spanish" where sibilants are stable (and, I should point
out to many of our readers, the native dialect of a couple of million
souls), at least, we should initially expect the sequence /sr/ to be
realized phonetically as [Zr], with voicing of the sibilant preceding the
voiced consonant, /r/, although still phonemically /sr/ (given that there
is no /z/ phoneme and the voicing contrast is non-distinctive and
predictable).  The big point is that we DON'T find [Zr], we find something
else which some of us in this discussion have transcribed [r], others [rr],
and I for my part must for now transcribe as [?r] where I cannot state the
nature of the segment represented by [?], but I feel there is something
there, i.e. I am explicitly rejecting the suggestion that "Israel" is (in
this kind of Spanish) phonetically and phonologically [irael] - /irael/
(where [r] and /r/ are the rolled or trilled r as in Spanish "irreal" -
/ireal/ - [ireal].
 
Actually, I'm saying two things.  That "Israel" is not pronounced, here, as
if it were "Irrael".  And that, in the phonology of (this form of) Spanish,
"s" is never dropped, not even in "Israel".  In which case, it is probably
rhotacised.  But only when an r follows.
 
With apologies for a lengthy message, which I hope is useful.
 
Alan