I was just on the English Wikipedia looking up Julio Iglesias. The pronunciation guide next to his name looked odd. It had an x as the first letter in Julio. When I clicked on the link, it says that the closest sound in English to the J in Julio is like the ch in loch (as in Loch Ness). I grew up in South Texas speaking both English and Spanish. I know several people personally named Julio. They all pronounce the J like the English H, like in the word house. I’ve always thought that loch was pronounced like lock, the last consonant sounding like a K. Have I been hearing either Julio or loch incorrectly, or is the Wikipedia pronunciation guide wrong?
It’s pronounced like the German “ch,” as in “Bach.”
That probably didn’t help.
The Scottish and German ‘ch’ when pronounced correctly kind of sounds like you’re hawking a loogie.
In that case, I wonder why Wikipedia says that this is how the Spanish J is pronounced. I’ve never known anyone to pronounce the name Julio with that kind of sound.
The hawking thing is probably a little bit overboard. The first part of this video probably gives a better description. How To Pronounce The German "CH" - YouTube
Mainly, hiss the ‘h’ sound way back in the throat, instead of more forward in the mouth the way most English speakers do.
Yes, but these are people in South Texas, whereas Iglesias is from Madrid.
I’m no expert, but I’m aware that there are pronunciation differences between Spanish as spoken in the Americas, and Spanish as spoken in Spain. Could this be one of them? Just as Texas has elided the pronunciation of “loch” so that, in Texan English, it sounds like “lock”, could they have elided the pronunciation of “Julio” so that, in Texan Spanish, it sounds like “Hulio”.
My (very limited) exposure to spoken Spanish is to Spanish as spoken by your actual Spaniard, and my impression is that the initial 'J" is, indeed, voiced more gutterally than the English ‘h’ sound - Julio, Javier, Jerez, jamon.
The Spanish “j” sound ranges from slightly “harsher” than English “h” – this is typical in Latin America – to quite a bit “harsher”* than English “h” – this is typical in Spain, home of Sr. Iglesias.
In other words, if you pronounce Spanish “j” as an English “h,” you will be understood perfectly everywhere – but in Mexico (say), people will notice that you pronounce it just a little softer than they do, while in Spain, they’ll find your pronunciation to be quite a bit softer.
*but still not quite as “harsh” as a Scottish/German “ch”
My ex-wife is from Peru and she pronounces her J’s in Spanish just like CH is pronounced in German. It sounds almost like she’s clearing her throat.
You can hear various Spanish speakers pronounce it here and hear the range. Both Mexican ones sound throaty, so much so that it does almost sound like they are beginning with a “k” sound (but they’re just said with the back of the tongue at the soft palate), at least to me. If your dialect does not make the distinction (and most English dialects don’t), it can just end up sounding like a “regular h” because you just “round off” to the nearest sound you’re familiar with.
FWIW I recently watched this documentary about Bach and the English narrator (a Bach expert) uses what is presumably the German pronunciation of Bach’s name. You can hear it as early as 7 second in to the video.
My wife is from Panama, and she pronounces the J in Spanish words exactly like the CH in the word loch, which I describe as attempting to pronounce the letter K while preventing the back of your tongue from touching your soft palate. The closer your tongue gets to your soft palate the harsher (or more pronounced) the CH is, until it touches your palate, which chokes off the airflow, creating the solid K sound. So my wife’s “Julio” sounds like “Khoolio” and “Jaime” sounds like “Khymeh”.
The ‘Ch’ in ‘Loch’ is a velar fricative sound. If you try to pronounce a H sound and then raise your tongue so it partially occludes the airflow at the back of your mouth, you’re making the sound. It also occurs in Russian and in Hebrew, among other languages. When you see a Russian word transliterated with a “KH”, that’s the sound they’re referring to.
Some varieties of Spanish (in Argentina, for example) pronounce the letter J as a velar fricative sound like in ‘Loch’, others pronounce it as something closer to an H. More than 50% of American Spanish speakers are of Mexican origin (I’d imagine that’s specially the case in Texas), and I believe Mexican Spanish pronounces the J as an English H sound, though I’m not sure.
So… … Achmed = …A …C… Phlegm…
Just to complicate matters…I never realized how close the modern standard French “r” sound is to these other velar fricatives, until I saw a poster ad in the Mexico City airport which humorously imitated some French phrase or other by replacing the rs with js, as in “mejci” (merci). At first I thought, “what are they thinking?”. Then I tried pronouncing “mejci” as a typical Mexican would, and lo and behold it sounded (to my inexpert ears, anyways) quite a bit like a Parisian exclamation of gratitude.
…and I don’t think you can say the French “r” is consistently voiced, while the Spanish “j” is consistently unvoiced. My impression is that, in both cases, voiced/unvoiced is more context-dependent (allophones) than a phonemic distinction. For example, the Spanish pronunciation of “Mexico” (in normal, rapid speech) is voiced, I think, all the way up to the “c”.
(Don’t be distracted by the “x” – pretend that it’s just a “j.” Indeed, it was a “j,” on most 18th-century maps, for example.)
Right on.
Flik, here’s one way you can practice the sound at the end of “loch”/“Bach” and the beginning of Castillian Spanish “Julio”:
Remember that /x/ you saw in the Wikipedia pronunciation guide? That /x/ is an International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) symbol for a velar fricative. Note: it’s an IPA convention to demarcate sound symbols by slashes.
So, what’s “velar”? And what’s a “fricative”?
Velar: a sound produced by placing the tongue on or close to the soft palate (aka the velum). In English, examples would be the “c” in coal (IPA /k/), the “k” in kick (also IPA /k/), and the "g"in goal (IPA /g/).
Plosive: a consonant produced by a momentary interruption of air escaping from the mouth. The consonants given above are examples in English of plosive consonants - both, in fact, being velar plosives. Other plosives in English are the “p” in pole (IPA /p/) and the “t” in toll (IPA /t/).
Fricative: a consonant produced by audible friction of air escaping from the mouth. In English, a few examples would be the “s” in soul (IPA /s/), the “f” in foal (IPA /f/), and the "sh"in shoal (IPA /ʃ/).
Now then. Plosives and fricatives can be produced by tongue contacts in the same general place on the palate. For example, English plosive /t/ and fricative /s/ are generally produced with the toungue firmly pressed against (/t/) or lightly touching (/s/) the alveolar ridge behind the upper front teeth. So you can start to pronounce /t/ as in toll, but then stop yourself in the middle of the /t/ – keeping your tongue in place on the alveolar ridge. Then you can force air through the /t/'s tongue/ridge contact and – tada! – you’re producing an /s/.
Even though native English vocabulary doesn’t contain a velar fricative, you can use the same trick described above to learn how to pronounce a velar fricative. Start to pronounce /k/ as in coal, but then stop yourself in the middle of the /k/ – keeping your tongue in place on the soft palate. Then you can force air through the /k/'s tongue/palate contact and – tada! – you’re producing an /x/ like the initial consonant in “Julio”.
In Spain we view the French /ʀ/ as something halfway between our /r/ (“double r” in Spanish, “trilled r” in English), and /g/ (the so-called “soft sister” of /x/; the g in go). We know we’ll never get it right, but we try to aproximate it by vibrating a /g/, and we transliterate it as g.
Interesting. I know the Spanish hard “g” is softer than the English one – hence doublets like “guamil/huamil” and “guarache/huarache,” as well as the humorous “estar guars” for “star wars” – but I never thought of it as soft enough to approximate a French “r”. Whole lotta similar sounds (representing all sorts of phonemes) made by allowing a certain amount of air to pass between the middle/back of the tongue and the roof of the mouth.