Portuguese-Galician, Castilian and other peninsular languages all started out with the X=Sh sound. Castilian has evolved while Portuguese has kept it. That’s what I meant.
It’s just your garden-variety voiceless alveolar lateral affricate.
Thanks for connecting the dots.
In European Spanish and really old Western Hemisphere Spanish, I see “Mexico” written as “Mejico.” Similarly when visiting the Alamo in San Antonio, one can see the now-current “Bexar” County written as “Bejar” in the historical documents. Heck, even “Tejas.” Hence without knowing one way or the other, I posit that the original spelling was with the letter j and so the early pronounciation for the country (or at least the conquistador’s hearing of the pronounciation) was the Spanish j sound. Someone with authority on the subject would be nice, though!
It’s simple: It’s their country, they can spell it however they like. As the indigenous population, perhaps they feel that the ‘x’ spelling better reflects their history and culture. The Mexicans I’ve talked to about this have agreed that “Mecksico” is probably closer to the original indigenous language pronunciation than “Mejico”.
We’ve had a somewhat similar situation with the largest Native American tribe here in Washington state. Several years ago the tribe decided they were tired of their name being mispronounced and insisted that the spelling be changed from “Yakima” to “Yakama”. Apparently “Yakama” was the way it was spelled when first transliterated into English in the 19th century and more accurately reflects the proper pronunciation, but somewhere along the line, probably through a typographical error, it got changed to “Yakima”. So now the city of Yakima, WA retains the “incorrect” spelling but everything else related to the the tribe is now spelled “Yakama”.
You got it backwards. Why don’t you read the thread? As I have already posted and the OP suggests, the original sound was SH and was written X and when the sound changed the ortography in Spain changed to reflect that but not in Mexico.
I can shoot myself in the foot because it’s my foot. It still doesn’t mean it is a sensible thing to do.
Spanish has the great advantage that the spelling reflects the exact pronunciation so that you can read any word even if you have never seen it before. As pronunciation of words changes so does the spelling. To toss that overboard makes no sense to me unless you believe making spelling and reading difficult is something good.
Perhaps you are just making stuff up as you go. Perhaps they have just kept the old spelling.
The Mexicans who have told you that are wrong. Look, I am not going to repeat myself again. This is getting tiring with people just posting wrong information.
Anyone who says otherwise needs to post some credible cites.
Just to reiterate, the X~sh sound was lost in Castilian but has remained in other peninsular languages, including Portuguese, Galician and Catalan.
For instance, medieval “caxa” (box) turned into “caja” in modern Spanish and into “caixa” in Portuguese, Galician, Catalan, etc.
Like caxa evolved to caja, Mexico evolved to Mejico, but Mexicans write “Caja Mexicana”.
I should point out that those sound changes are both easy to motivate and reasonably common. In Irish, for instance, palatal [s] became [sh] [I’m using English orthography for simplicity] quite early, and both lenite to [h] in certain grammatical (originally phonological) circumstances.
Also, regarding as a graphic representation of these sounds: in Old French, is commonly used as a scribal abbreviation for [-us]. The reason a lot of -al nouns pluralize in -aux is simply because the represents some sort of [s] sound. (See http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/8716/chapter2.html). All this is by way of suggesting that anyone who thinks that sailor is incorrect has some serious ’splainin’ to do. Not only is what he says accurate, it is perfectly consistent with other sound changes and orthographic conventions in Western Europe.
wiki :
In Spain, the Castilian dialect’s pronunciation is commonly regarded as the national standard, although a use of slightly different pronouns called laísmo of this dialect is deprecated. More accurately, for nearly everyone in Spain, “standard Spanish” means, “pronouncing everything exactly as it is written,”[citation needed] an ideal which does not correspond to any real dialect, though the northern dialects are the closest to it. In practice, the standard way of speaking Spanish in the media is “written Spanish” for formal speech, “Madrid dialect” (one of the transitional variants between Castilian and Andalusian) for informal speech.[citation needed]. The variety with the most number of speakers is Mexican Spanish, making up nearly a third of Spanish speakers.[citation needed]
This section (“an ideal which does not correspond to any real dialect”) is misleading, and basically false as written. I think what they mean is that the official code you are taught as a Spanish learner for how to deconstruct the sounds does not apply perfectly to any single dialect. So what? All dialects of Spanish are internally consistent: an -ll- will always sound like all the other -ll-s in your dialect, whether that is -ly- or -y- or -zh-. If you speak Mexican Spanish, you learn to pronounce written Spanish as Mexicans do. That the Castillians pronounced /c/ and /z/ differently is irrelevant to you. Castillians do not care that Puerto Ricans drop final -s in speech. But whatever a Mexican writes, a Castillian speaker can pronounce perfectly — as if it were Castillian.
Just to throw it out into the discussion. In Japanese. Mexico is pronounced as “me-ki-shi-ko” but I would prefer either “me-ku-shi-ko” or “me-hi-ko”.
That article must have been written by someone who did not know what he was talking about. Laismo is a question of grammar, not pronunciation, so it makes no sense. Laismo would be bad grammar, not bad pronunciation. What the article says would be equivalent to saying that “I ain’t go no bananas” is just a bad pronunciation of “I don’t have any bananas”. In other words, the author can not tell the difference between grammar and ortography. Not something I would use as a cite.
At any rate, the point stands that Mexican Spanish is losing spelling consistency when they choose to adapt the spelling of some words to the new pronunciation, like “caja”, and retain the old spelling in other words like Mexico or Texas. Probably they have retained it mostly in geographical proper names while common names have all transitioned to phonetic spelling.
There are words in Spanish which are in transition and can be spelled with either the new or older pronunciation like septiembre-setiembre, obscuro-oscuro, etc.
Clock was originally “relox” and, following the common rule, became “reloj” but the final aspirated “j” is awkward and mostly not pronounced so the word is rendered as “reló” and some people write it that way.
A word which used to have an x was pexe, which evolved to peixe in Galician and originally, as would be expected, to peje in Castillian but then, for reasons I ignore, to pez.
What are you blathering about?
In English it’s PARIS
In French it’s PAREE.
Pair-us?
Sheesh!
like ‘two below PAR IS ok’? I don’t think so; ‘Pair us’ approximates the pronunciation a lot better.
Pair us, pronounced Pare Uz.
Shirley you jest
Not really, because “Pair” has a long A, but Paris (as pronounced in English) has a short A.
And I am not sure where you get the U vowel in the second syllable from - I’ve never heard anyone pronounce it like that!
But trying to spell phonetically is always fraught with difficulty. I’d suggest: say “pat risk”, then delete the final letter sound of each word and put them together!
You are welcome to show us a cite which supports what you say. You can also try to edit wiki so it meets your idea of what the truth is. Of coruse, this is ort of a contradiction in terms- Spanish is pronounced exactly as it is spelled, however different dialect pronounce words differently, but they are spelled the same. Is that what you are saying?:dubious:
This is indeed exactly what I am saying. I’m not sure I see the problem.
Una vez he tenido cinco llamas. (Once I had five llamas).
No matter which dialect of Spanish you speak, each one of those letters* will always represent the same sound. Many of those letters, for example <c>, intervocalic <d>, <ll>, make different noises in different regions of the world. But whatever noise they make, they will always make those noises. The system is internally consistent, but there is no reason to enforce a single pronunciation of each and every word across the Spanish-speaking world. Your objection seems to be that different Spanish-speakers pronounce things different ways in different dialects, but that’s a separate issue from orthography.
So if I write,
Llevudar munaz jincítuña, which is nonsense, any literate Spanish-speaker will know exactly how to pronounce it. Mexicans and Castillians will have a different rendering of this into sound from each other, but any speaker of any Spanish dialect will come up with the same pronunciation as any speaker of that same dialect.
Now try it with English.
Give the ghost girl enough giraffes. Well, clearly, there’s no single consistent rule for <gi> or <gh> or for the hard “g” sound (as in “girl”), which can either be <g> or <gh>.
What if I write
Girry vough the gisp? No matter what dialect of English you speak, you don’t have enough information to pronounce that. “Jirry” and “ghirry” would be equally good guesses, as would “vow” or “voe” or “voo.” Spanish speakers never have to worry about that kind of choice. That’s all I’m saying.
*Remember '<ll> is its own letter, not <l> twice, even though it is typed that way.
Then “ghoti” is pronounced “fish”, right?:rolleyes: