How is the the letter “d” pronunced in the words “mirado”, “mitad”? Is the first like a voiced “th” and the second not?
My understanding is that D is generally pronounced like a voiced TH when it comes between vowels.
D in Spanish is pronounced always the same (except when it’s not pronounced, see below), there’s no difference in how it’s pronounced depending on what accompanies it; it sounds like the d in difference. IPA symbol, d.
When speaking quickly and loosely, ds tend to get lost. For example, mirado pronounced when speaking “correctly” is pronounced /mi.'ra.do/, but speaking quickly it becomes /mi.'rao/ or /mi.'rau/; /mi.'tad/ becomes /mi.'ta/. The pronunciation of the d doesn’t change, the whole phoneme goes “pouf”.
OK, now that I’m not in a hurry… I cheated, the r in those phonetic transcriptions should have been /ɾ/. And if I’m understanding the IPA correctly, the main symbol for the d sound should also be /D/ not /d/.
Which is the way I was taught to pronounce “d” in Spanish classes I took in several different states.
So El Cid is El Sith? Scary.
I’ll take Nava’s word over Wikipedia.
I am not a native speaker, but have studied Spanish for many years and speak it often. I hear the ‘d’ in words like mirado more or less like an English ‘d’.
Here is a news report:
How do the 'd's in lendadores at 1:45 sound?More like El Thið
And remember there are pronunciation variants across the Hispanosphere that don’t make it righter or wronger. Some prefer all Ds to be hard palatal (a-la-English), others soft alveolar, others change according to syllable placement.
In that video, I don’t hear an English “th” sound. I hear a dental d, which is slightly different from the English “d” but not as different as English “th.”
In seseo accents it’s “el Sid”, but not in the kind of pronunciation from which the spelling derives. The Arabic word from which it does derive is usually transcribed Sidí.
I’m going to take Wikipedia over Nava here, for several reasons:
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Wikipedia backs up what the pronunciation guide in my Spanish-English dictionary says (that thre are three pronunciations of D depending on contrext),
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From hearing native Spanish speakers (granted, all the ones I know are Lat-Am, not Spanish) it doesn’t sound like an English D to me,
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For the languages that I do speak, I think the Wikipedia is more or less accurate though not always complete,
and
- Sometimes native speakers don’t notice details of their native language as easy as outsiders do. In English, C/K has an entirely different pronunciation depending on whether it’s at the beginning of the word or not (aspirate C vs non-aspirate, e.g. “cat” vs “picking”), and in northern Indian languages these would be considered entirely different sounds, but if you asked most native English speakers they probably wouldn’t notice the difference.
/D/ is a symbol in SAMPA, but not in IPA.
/D/ in SAMPA = /ð/ in IPA, as shown in John Mace’s post above.
English palatal “d” [d]
Dental “d” [d̯] — which is what I hear in that Spanish news report
English voiced “th” (as in "this) — [ð]
Ok, because the official guide I have has ‘d’ as a voiced “th” when between vowels; but trying to say, “¿Lo ha mirado, V.?”, is a tongue twister with the final ´do´-- it sounds almost like “mira’o” (as someone stated above) or “miratho”, not quite right sounding to me.
And saying “nada” as instructed is harder to pronounce, the tongue must travel farther and makes less of a noise, making it harder to be heard, but the alternative seems to be a bad Gringo accent with English phenomes pushed onto another language.
Well, for starters, nobody would pronounce lo ha mirado uve… 
That’s not even any of the usual abbreviations for the formal modes of address, I figure whomever wrote it was aiming for usted but that’s my crystal ball talking, maybe he’s a 16th-century escapee trying to get you to say vuecencia. But if you’re at the point of worrying if your d’s are a tad foreign you’re miles above 99% of foreign speakers of Spanish. Don’t go too crazy over it, there are a lot of sounds which are much more problematic for someone with English as first language.
Oh, and speaking of using güiki as a cite, maybe some of you should speak with the people who maintain the entry for AFI del español:
(with my apologies for the loss of a bunch of bars)
(added the dashes to realign stuff somewhat and removed everything after the information for the letter “d”)
The author(s) has mixed SAMPA and IPA symbols in the same article. Specifically, they’re using SAMPA symbols for phonemes, and IPA symbols for allophones**. Given that, the güikipiya article essentially squares with the Wikipedia information that John Mace first posted in this thread.
**Cliff’s Notes: allophones are more detailed than phonemes. In English, pin and spin would be written with the same phoneme /p/ for both “p” sounds, but different allophones: /pɩn/, /spɩn/ versus [p[sup]h[/sup]ɩn], [spɩn]. And yes, even use of slashes versus brackets is a meaningful distinction in phonetic transcription – slashes indicated phonemic transcription or “broad transcription” while brackets indicate allophonic transcription or “narrow transcription”.
Ciudad Real.. Note pronunciation guide.
Unlike English, Spanish (well the European variety at least) has an actual authority that decides these issues, right?
Someone should look up what the Royal Academy has to say.