From whence come this Spanish accent?

Factual Questions
1

As many of you know, I’m currently studying the Spanish language, and while I’m pretty proficient, I’m lacking somewhat in the area of understanding native speakers when they’re, well, speaking. I do OK when I’m speaking and hearing Spanish in a one-on-one conversation with someone who understands that it’s not my native language (yeah, I guess it’s not all that hard to tell), but when multiple native speakers enter the picture and they all start talking really fast as they are wont to do, my understanding starts to break down. So I’ve been working on that aspect by listening to Padres (baseball) games on the radio and watching other teams’ games on TV. Well, I really just started recently, and today I watched baseball on TV in Spanish for the first time, in the Atlanta-Arizona game that just concluded on TBS.

I noticed something peculiar: Both the play-by-play announcer and the color commentator dropped the ‘s’ sound from a lot of words but pronounced it perfectly fine in others. It wasn’t that they were dropping that sound in one letter but pronouncing it in another–“buscar” became “bu’car” but “paso” was still “paso”, for example. The play-by-play announcer did it a lot more than the color commentator, and he also spoke more slowly and enunciated his words more clearly. The color commentator’s accent sounded to me like the Tijuana accent that’s pretty standard here, otherwise. Can anyone enlighten me on where this s-dropping business comes from, why it only happens in some words and not in others, and whether there’s any rhyme or reason as to which words?

2

[QUOTE=fetus]
Can anyone enlighten me on where this s-dropping business comes from, why it only happens in some words and not in others, and whether there’s any rhyme or reason as to which words?
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I was lead to believe that the custom for the dropped s is from Andalucia. They also sometimes drop the d in the past participal so that, for example, the word “pringado” is pronounced “pringao.” Apparently New World Spanish pronunciation owes a huge debt to Andalucian pronunciation.

3

Interesting. These guys were definitely not Spaniards, so it must’ve come indirectly–but to where? I’ve done a pretty good deal of talking to native Spanish speakers and never encountered this before. I would assume somewhere in Mexico just because I can’t see Turner wanting or needing to go too many countries away to find a Spanish speaking baseball fan who wants a job calling games–but where? Is it from the east, thusly why I’ve never heard it in California or Arizona?

4

My actual speaking experience is limited to mostly Mexicans and Guatemalans, though I have spoken with people from other parts of Latin America, and watched some movies in Castillian (from Spain) Spanish.

Basically, dropping the “S” sound on the end of words is a very popular practice. It originates in Spain, but throughout Latin America it is prevalent enough, and varies quite a bit by region. (Argentina, for example, is pretty close to Spain in this regard) As for dropping “s” sounds in the middle of words, that doesn’t really happen, but in fact it is replaced with a soft, lisping “th” sound. This doesn’t usually happen to the letter “s”, but the soft “c”.

So “paso” and “buscar” would both keep their “s” sounds (did you just use buscar off the top of your head, or did you really hear him pronounce it bu-KAR? I can’t imagine that being the case), but “doce” becomes “do-THey”, “cinco” becomes “THINK-o”, and “dos” becomes “do”.

I got in the habit of leaving it off the ends of words a lot just because it’s easier. If anyone is insistent on keeping “S” sounds as much as possible however, it’s Mexicans. So if your commentators weren’t Spanish, I would guess they were from somewhere else in Latin America, but not Mexico. (even if they were in Mexico, they may have originated elsewhere) Even that is not a total blanket, hard-and-fast rule though.

5

You’re talking about the Castilian practice called ceceo, where the ‘s’ sounds of the letters “c” and “z” become that “th” sound. That isn’t what I’m talking about. It never happens to the letter “s”, BTW.

I heard him say “paso” and “buscar” at least four times each and every time he pronounced the s in “paso” but not in “buscar”. There was sort of an…empty space, I can’t really explain it; it’s not quite like he didn’t say it at all, but, well, he didn’t pronounce the sound.

I know for a fact they aren’t Spanish because (a) they’re baseball fans :wink: and (b) they didn’t use ceceo. I’m certainly willing to believe they’re from Latin America–the play-by-play guy, who dropped the ‘s’ a lot more, also pronounced “y” and “ll” like Rio de la Plata natives do, with a “zh” sound, but they use that in parts of Mexico too.

6

Aspirating the “s” at the end of a syllable, and specially when immediately followed by a consonant, so that “buscar” becomes “buh-car” and “desde” becomes “deh-DE” is a very widespread practice across Latin America. And like swallowing up the “d” in participles, it’s legacy from Andalucia
Being baseball commentators you’re dealing with, they could plausibly come from Puerto Rico, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, various regions of Mexico… and of course the USA.

The standard for final-s (as it is with final d) is that you* subtly * soften and shorten the sound, to avoid sounding stilted (or spitting on the other person); when it’s immediately followed by a syllable that starts with a consonant, the speaker tends to subsume the “s” as he shifts his breath pattern. In your examples, the syllable breakdown of the words is:

paso – pa-so, “s” is initial in its syllable

buscar – bus-car, “s” is final in its syllable, and followed by a consonant.

7

According to the TBS web site, both Fernando Palacios and Pete Manzano (their Spanish-language baseball broadcaster) are from Puerto Rico.

8

Oops - I meant “broadcasters,” not “broadcaster.”

9

This is a very common feature of Spanish dialects. It did indeed originate in Andalucía as mentioned above (according to various professors I’ve had) but it’s common in a lot of different dialects. /s/ is either realized as /h/ or dropped entirely at the ends of words or before consonants, so España becomes Ehpaña or Epaña. It’s almost universal in the Caribbean, and it’s common in quite a number of other places in Latin America, though I couldn’t say exactly which ones. It’s one of those generally widespread dialectual features, though.

How it shows up depends a lot on how the speaker is speaking. More /s/ sounds will be dropped in rapid speech and fewer are dropped in very formal speech.

No. In Peninsular Spanish, the letters “z” and “c” (before “i” or “e”) represent an entirely different sound than “s”. The sound is a dental fricative, like the “th” of English. This is not a piecemeal “lisp” (I have absolutely no idea why people refer to it that way, and I know you’re not the first, but it’s every bit as nonsensical as calling the “th” sound of English a “lisp”.) It has to do with the history of Spanish; in medieval times, “c” and “z” represented /ts/ and /dz/ respectively; those gradually changed to the dental fricative in Spain, but in parts of Andalucía the sound was gradually replaced by /s/ and this is universal in the New World. The New World, in this case, diverges from the historical norm, and in Spain the Latin American-style pronunciation is described as “seseo”. In the Spanish of Spain, “c/z” and “s” simply don’t represent the same sound, any more than “s” and “th” do in English.

It’s an entirely separate phenomenon from the aspirating/dropping of /s/ sounds - the two things have nothing to do with one another.

This is not “ceceo”. “Ceceo” (in the very few places I’ve seen the term used) refers to a phenomenon found in some areas of rural Andalucía in which /s/ is replaced by the “th” sound; I’m not sure if that particular regional accent exists at all anymore, but it could be reasonably described as “lisping”.

Right. It wouldn’t effect the “s” in “paso”, as that’s at the beginning of a syllable and between two vowels. It only occurs, if memory serves, before consonants and at the end of an utterance. That means a lot of word-final "s"s are dropped, but they won’t be dropped if the next word begins with a vowel.

10

[QUOTE=Jeff Lichtman]
According to the TBS web site, both Fernando Palacios and Pete Manzano (their Spanish-language baseball broadcaster) are from Puerto Rico.
[/QUOTE]

That would explain it, then. Like I said, it’s universal in the Caribbean, and it occurs more freely than it does in most other places. Some speculation exists that the /s/ in that phonetic environment is disappearing entirely in Caribbean Spanish, and soon won’t exist even in the most careful speech.

11

[QUOTE=fetus]
You’re talking about the Castilian practice called ceceo, where the ‘s’ sounds of the letters “c” and “z” become that “th” sound. That isn’t what I’m talking about. It never happens to the letter “s”, BTW.
[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=Excalibre]
No. In Peninsular Spanish, the letters “z” and “c” (before “i” or “e”) represent an entirely different sound than “s”. The sound is a dental fricative, like the “th” of English. This is not a piecemeal “lisp” (I have absolutely no idea why people refer to it that way, and I know you’re not the first, but it’s every bit as nonsensical as calling the “th” sound of English a “lisp”.) It has to do with the history of Spanish; in medieval times, “c” and “z” represented /ts/ and /dz/ respectively; those gradually changed to the dental fricative in Spain, but in parts of Andalucía the sound was gradually replaced by /s/ and this is universal in the New World. The New World, in this case, diverges from the historical norm, and in Spain the Latin American-style pronunciation is described as “seseo”. In the Spanish of Spain, “c/z” and “s” simply don’t represent the same sound, any more than “s” and “th” do in English.
[/QUOTE]

Right. I said the “s” sound, meaning “ssssss”. I know it doesn’t happen to the letter “s”. (as I explained in my next sentence, it happens to the soft “c”, and you’re correct that it also happens to the “z”, which I didn’t mention) I didn’t know, however, that there was a name for it. Gracias a la Dope.

12

[QUOTE=Rigamarole]
Right. I said the “s” sound, meaning “ssssss”. I know it doesn’t happen to the letter “s”. (as I explained in my next sentence, it happens to the soft “c”, and you’re correct that it also happens to the “z”, which I didn’t mention) I didn’t know, however, that there was a name for it. Gracias a la Dope.
[/QUOTE]

My problem is with the way you frame it. It’s not a phonological process that happens to some /s/ sounds (phonological processes don’t care what letter a sound is written with.) They are simply different sounds to start out with in Peninsular Spanish - and historically speaking, what happened was a phonological process occurred in Latin American Spanish that changed the /T/ (that is, like the English “th”) sound to /s/. Not the other way around. Your comparison to the entirely separate phenomenon of aspiration of /s/ sounds is a bad one, because aspiration only occurs in rapid, casual speech, while the /T/ sound exists in all registers of Peninsular Spanish.

You seem to describe it as a process that affects the pronunciation of /s/ sounds, but that simply is not the case, as those /T/ sounds were /T/ to start out with - they never were /s/ sounds either historically or in their underlying mental representation in Peninsular Spanish. Whereas (at least in most dialects) aspiration is a process that operates between the level of the mental representation of a word and its surface appearance. There’s a phonological rule that operates in casual speech that turns /s/ before a consonant into /0/ in many Spanish dialects. There’s an underlying word /bus kar/ that is transformed by phonological rules into /buh kar/ or /bu kar/. There’s no such intervening phonological process in Pensinsular Spanish, and that’s the implication that I have a problem with.

13

[QUOTE=Excalibre]
My problem is with the way you frame it. It’s not a phonological process that happens to some /s/ sounds (phonological processes don’t care what letter a sound is written with.) They are simply different sounds to start out with in Peninsular Spanish - and historically speaking, what happened was a phonological process occurred in Latin American Spanish that changed the /T/ (that is, like the English “th”) sound to /s/. Not the other way around. Your comparison to the entirely separate phenomenon of aspiration of /s/ sounds is a bad one, because aspiration only occurs in rapid, casual speech, while the /T/ sound exists in all registers of Peninsular Spanish.

You seem to describe it as a process that affects the pronunciation of /s/ sounds, but that simply is not the case, as those /T/ sounds were /T/ to start out with - they never were /s/ sounds either historically or in their underlying mental representation in Peninsular Spanish. Whereas (at least in most dialects) aspiration is a process that operates between the level of the mental representation of a word and its surface appearance. There’s a phonological rule that operates in casual speech that turns /s/ before a consonant into /0/ in many Spanish dialects. There’s an underlying word /bus kar/ that is transformed by phonological rules into /buh kar/ or /bu kar/. There’s no such intervening phonological process in Pensinsular Spanish, and that’s the implication that I have a problem with.
[/QUOTE]

Fair enough.

:slight_smile:

14

I’m really surprised you had never noticed this before. Like JR and Excalibre said, it’s extremely common in Spanish, mostly because S and D take time to pronounce and slow down the speaker. Our local native Spanish speakers are overwhelmingly Dominican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban, and they usually drop the Ss that come before consonants and either replace them with a little aspiration or just don’t say them at all. As for the Ds, the ones between vowels tend to be diminished, and sometimes removed altogether – like in lado, which I occasionally hear as láo.

When I first started learning, I was very careful to say things like Yo busco a mi amiga para que le pueda decir que estoy cansado y que me voy and now it’s Bu’co a mi amiga pa’ que le pue’a decir que ehtoy cansáo y me voy. I, however, do not regularly drop the Ss off my plurals. I’m more likely to do it if it’s a masculine word than a feminine (I think mostly because el changes to los – which I pronounce lo’ – whereas la and las would sound the same without the S), but even then it’s not every time.

This is more or less the accent of the speakers around me so it’s the one I’ve adopted, but I also hear it all the time on Telemundo and Univision. It used to drive me crazy cause I just wanted to scream SAY ALL THE LETTERS, DAMMIT, but you get used to it pretty quick.

15

[QUOTE=fetus]
You’re talking about the Castilian practice called ceceo, where the ‘s’ sounds of the letters “c” and “z” become that “th” sound. That isn’t what I’m talking about. It never happens to the letter “s”, BTW.

I heard him say “paso” and “buscar” at least four times each and every time he pronounced the s in “paso” but not in “buscar”. There was sort of an…empty space, I can’t really explain it; it’s not quite like he didn’t say it at all, but, well, he didn’t pronounce the sound.
[/QUOTE]

fetus:

Seseo is the Southern Spanish (Andalusia, Extremadura, Castilla-La Mancha and most of Latin America) practice of pronouncing the c/z as s.

Ceceo is a pronunciation defect (not an accent) by which some people just can’t pronounce the s, so they turn s into a z.

Northern Spanish (the whole rest of Spain and some parts of Latin America) distinguishes between c/z and s. I’d say “properly” but then I get accused of being a racist :stuck_out_tongue: and there’s more of them with the Southern accents.

Please kick your teacher who explained this for me, will ya? He got it wrong.

I’m from Northern Spain and have been “accused” of copying a Colombian accent: the majority of mountainous areas were populated by Northern Spaniards, so altiplane Colombians, Peruvians, altiplane Equatorians… sound a lot more like Northern Spaniards than like Andalusians.

The dropped s is definitely the harshest Andalusian accent; another variant is turning it into a sort of aspired sound. I had a coworker who turned her lastanme into “moléh” and got angry when people didn’t understand it. I’ve heard it from some Caribbean speakers (some Venezuelan and caribbean Colombians).

The job mobility through Latin America is huge. My last job was 6 months in Costa Rica; another coworker and me would sometimes get so bored we’d jwatch any of the Latin cable and try to “peg” accents on people. Where they work and where they’re from are different questions altogether. The nationalities of our Costa Rican clients included Argentina, Brasil, Colombia, Perú, Nicaragua, Mexico - that I can remember on the fly.

16

Thanks…I don’t know why I didn’t think of looking that up myself!

Puerto Rico seems to be a hotbed of language oddities; I’ve heard from a couple of sources that end-of-syllable 'r’s are pronounced ‘l’ and vice versa, supposedly as an influence of Chinese slaves who were brought there however many centuries ago to build a wall. :dubious:

That’s what’s kind of odd–the play-by-play guy was being slower and more formal and dropping way more of them.

I’ve heard 'D’s dropped, although more often at the ends of words (verdad becomes verdá). The ridiculously overwhelming majority of Spanish speakers here are from Baja California, and most of the rest are from somewhere else in Mexico.

Actually, my teacher never talked about ceceo or seseo, I looked them both up on Wikipedia as part of a project I did last semester…and apparently remembered both wrong.

17

[QUOTE=fetus]
Thanks…I don’t know why I didn’t think of looking that up myself!

Puerto Rico seems to be a hotbed of language oddities; I’ve heard from a couple of sources that end-of-syllable 'r’s are pronounced ‘l’ and vice versa, supposedly as an influence of Chinese slaves who were brought there however many centuries ago to build a wall. :dubious:
[/quote]

In some Caribbean dialects, syllable-final /l/ and /r/ are switched around; as far as I know, the two sounds are in free variation (which means speakers are inconsistent in regard to which they use in which word.)

It has nothing to do with Chinese; please continue being dubious. That’s not even phonologically plausible (and while Japanese speakers screw up English “r” and “l”, I’ve never noticed any particular tendency for Chinese speakers to do so.)

Some people do it more than others, no doubt. Everyone’s idiolect is unique.

18

Once again, The Dope provides the answer to a question I had before I even had to ask it! Coincidentally, I just returned from a week in Mexico, and really noticed and wondered about the missing 's" sound in some words. Of course I turned to the SDMB and found this thread right up front.

A somewhat related question: my traveling companions asked me last week how different Mexican Spanish is from, say, that spoken in Spain. My response was that it was pretty much like British English and American English: different words in some cases, different expressions and certainly different accents that might make a Spaniard difficult at times to understand to a Mexican, but it’s the same language. New World Spanish of course is going to diverge from Castillian because it’s been quite some time since this hemisphere was colonized.

Was I correct, or is my mixture of classroom Spanish and Sabado Gigante Spanish screwing me up?

19

[QUOTE=fetus]
You’re talking about the Castilian practice called ceceo, where the ‘s’ sounds of the letters “c” and “z” become that “th” sound. That isn’t what I’m talking about. It never happens to the letter “s”, BTW.
[/QUOTE]

And to be more precise:

It happens to the letter c only when followed by an e or an i. If followed by an o, a u, or an a, it is pronounced like a k. The z (pronounced “theta” in proper Castilian Spanish) takes the th sound everywhere.

20

My experience is that this practice is taken to a high art in Cuban Spanish, but that’s the most common Carribean Spanish accent I’ve heard, so maybe I haven’t been exposed to a good, representative sample.