From: Rick McCallister
Message: 61183
Date: 2008-11-01
--- On Sat, 11/1/08, Arnaud Fournet <fournet.arnaud@...> wrote:
. . .
> I don't know much about Spanish,
> but your examples suggest /g/ is dropped in the context
> g+u+vowel in some
> Spanish dialects,
> they say nothing about /w/ being a phoneme.
>
> Arnaud
You do need to know that Spanish has no dialects per se. It has regional accents but these are very fluid with most differences at the basolect.
<guV> is pronounced /wV/ by almost all speakers I run into. Occasionally you'll hear a Spaniard pronounce it /GwV/, where /G/ is a fricative but I don't recall any native speakers ever saying /gwV/.
So show some /weBos/ and admit you're wrong.
Conventional proof that /w/ is a phoneme in Spanish is seen in the lack of accent mark in continuo --in Spanish, /kontinuo/ would be written *contÃnuo because words ending in vowels are normally stressed on the next to the last syllable. But given that Spanish considers <i> and <u> as weak vowels, they become /y/ and /w/ next to another vowel unless marked by a written accent mark.