--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "P&G" <G&P@...> wrote:
>
> > Must sound change be linguistically motivated?
>
> Of course not! We know that some sound changes are socially
motivated, for
> example, social climbing, or group identity. So when young people
today say
> /?/ instead of their parents' /t/, it is about street cred, not
phonetics.
> Similar explanations have been offered (rightly or wrongly) for
the Spanish
> lisp - it was imitation of the speech patterns of a superior.
There are
> many such examples, from grammar as well as phonetics.
>
> Peter
About the Spanish "lisp"... There does exist a rumour about a
Spanish king who lisped. According to this story, the Spanish
people imitated his lisp in order to make him feel better, and since
then, the Spanish have spoken with a Castilian "lisp".
However, the Spanish lisp, properly called the ceceo, is really not
a lisp at all. The /s/ sound does exist in Spanish and is
represented by the letter S. Only the 'c' and the 'z' make sounds
similar to the English "th". If the Spanish had been imitating a
king, the /s/ sound would not exist at all.
Here is the correct explanation: In medieval Castilian there were
two sounds that eventually evolved into the ceceo the ç (the
cedilla) as in plaça and the z as in dezir. The cedilla made
a /ts/ sound and the z a /dz/ sound.
Most of Spain (except for the Canary Islands) speaks with this
ceceo, but the rest of the Spanish speaking world (95% of Spanish
speakers) speak with seseo, meaning that the /ts/and the /dz/ sounds
evolved into an /s/ sound. How or when that happened I am not
sure... I still need to do my research on that.
Just wanted to clarify...
Caroline