Sorry, perhaps I wasn’t clear. I was saying that if I saw the word “tortilla” and “tortia” spelled in a Spanish context, in my English I would pronounce them the same (though they are not the same.) It’s not really an important point in the context of this thread, and is a little side comment about how I phonetically rendered the word in English (forgetting the “y”, which in my accent, at least, would show up there anyway, even if the “ll” were missing in Spanish.)
Help me clarify my ignorance of Spanish here. When a word ends with -ia, is that treated as two separate syllables pronounced “ee-yuh” as you wrote? If so, would the default accent be “EE-yuh”, that being the penultimate syllable?
Or is -ia treated as a single syllable, having a “ya” sound like the Cyrillic Я? If so, the accent would be on the syllable before that?
If “-ia” is to be pronounced as two syllables, would it be written as “-ía”?
Two separate syllables, but it would not have that glide “y” there. So more like “ee-uh” (though the second syllable is not a schwa) rather than “ee-yuh.”
However, if it were spelled “tortiya”, the English pronunciation would most decidedly not be like “torsha”. The Russian word, according to google translate, is “тортилья”, where the “ь” tells the speaker to enunciate the glide on the “я”, which may actually darken the “л” to the point that it is nearly inaudible.
FTR, I put an accent on the i of “tortía” specifically to show that it would be a separate (and accented) syllable.
The word I keep thinking of is “ranchería”, which refers to a Native American community. (It’s a California thing.) But often written “-ia” without the accent mark.
So how is this to be pronounced? Properly spelled with the accented í, it would be ranch-e-RI-a, as @BigT 's post just above would suggest. But if mis-spelled without the accent, and pronounced that way, I think it would be ran-CHER-ya, which is probably absurd.