On Mon, 02 Jan 2006 10:12:11 +0000, caroline049
<
caroline049@...> wrote:
>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.
When is the 16th. century, approximately. How is more
complicated. There are several changes occurring more or
less simultaneously. One is the general loss of voiced
fricatives (v > b, z > s, 3 > c, z^ > s^), which eventually
affected all Spanish dialects (and some Galaico-Portuguese
and Catalan-Valencian ones as well). The other is the
development of the old affricates /3/ and /c/ (/dz/ and
/ts/) into fricatives. This did not immediately result in
the merger of old /c/ (and /3/) with /s/ (and /z/), because
the sibilants were (and are) apical alveolar [tip of the
tongue pointing up to the alveolar ridge] over the whole of
Northern Iberia, while the old affricates developed into
laminal alveolar [tip of the tongue pointing down towards
the lower teeth] or flat dental [tip of the tongue flat
against the front teeth] fricatives, as is still the case in
Northern Portuguese, which distinguishes apical /s/ (ss) and
/z/ (s) from laminal /s/ (ç) and /z/ (z) [A similar
distinction is made in Basque, which has apical /s/ and
/ts/, and laminal /s/ and /ts/ (spelled <z> and <tz>),
except Bizkaian, where <s> and <z> have merged as apical
/s/, and <tz> and <ts> have merged a laminal /s/ = <z>]. In
Castilian, the dental/laminal fricative became interdental,
while the apical remained apical. An exception is Western
Andalusia (and hence Canarian and Spanish American), where
apical /s/ was lost and merged with laminal /s/ from old <ç>
and <z>. The result is called "seseo" when the merged
phoneme is a laminal fricative, and "ceceo" when the merged
phoneme is a flat dental /s/ (which is acoustically closer
to Castilian interdental /T/).
The myth about the "lisping King" is totally unknown in
Spain itself, as far as I know.
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...