Oh yea, forgot to add, in the first link given, search for “seseo”, and you’ll get the page I quoted. I apologize for missing that part.
And a bit :smack: to me, for not being a better editor…
Should be:
“…it is NOT correct to sesear. The standard that you mention is correct, but the other form is also accepted as “lengua culta”.”
With my background in linguistics, I’d be interested, too, especially since almost all of my free time I’m using American Spanish. I just meant to say that you probably won’t be able to get a really definitive answer, since we really can’t know how people pronounced word-initial consonants until the era of audio recording. It’s all conjecture, and you’ll probably never get the “facts” you want. Still, I agree, it is interesting.
It’s also worth pointing out that only a small minority of all Spanish speakers use this so-called “standard” form. The vast majority of Spanish speakers, that is, Latin Americans as well as many Peninsular Spaniards, sesear.
¡Y yo también!
Of all the (many, many) Spanish speakers I have met, only one would cecear. And he was from Barcelona. I tried it out for a while – one good thing about learning a new language is that you can pick your accent and nobody minds – but I just couldn’t consistently separate the C and Z from the S and I didn’t want to lithp my way through every conversation. It was further reinforced by the fact above: the wildly vast majority of Western Hemisphere Spanish speakers pronounce C, S, and Z the same.
Yes, that is also noted in the RAE’s website, if one digs around the Diccionario that I mentioned long enough. In fact, I think it is mentioned in the “seseo” entry, among others.
I never meant that dialects were “lazy speak”. But I’ve never met a speaker whose “tired at night” speech was 100% identical to “standard Spanish”; speaking or writing in “100% grammatically correct, easily-spelled Spanish” requires some extra effort from everybody, even Vallisoletanos. Your seseo is perfectly acceptable as is my -ico, but when I’m speaking with someone not-from-my area I’m careful to avoid localisms (many of which are arcaic words), to stress words in the proper place and to pronounce every sillable.
While Valladolid is only one town, the area in Spain where seseo is not the norm includes:
- Galicia,
- Asturias,
- Cantabria,
- Castilla-León,
- Euskadi,
- Navarra,
- Aragon,
- Catalonia,
- The Balearic Islands,
- Valencia,
Parts of:
- The Canary Islands (dialects there vary by island and even within each island),
- Castilla-La Mancha (its southernmost provinces, closest to Andalusia),
- Murcia (again the area closest to Andalusia),
- Madrid.
The areas where seseo is the norm are:
- Extremadura,
- Andalusia.
Extremeños from Cáceres (the northern province) sesean less than those from Badajoz.
That’s 10 provinces where seseo is the norm; 6-7 where it’s mixed; 33-34 where it’s not the norm. The areas where it’s not the norm include 4 of Spain’s 6-largest urban areas (Bilbao, Barcelona, Valencia and Zaragoza), with Sevilla in the seseo camp and Madrid mixed.
I’m not talking about other aspects of “standard Spanish”, just about this one.
I think the questions the OP may want to ask are three-fold:
-
why did seseo appear
-
why do some speakers in seseante areas turn S into an almost-J (and why some of these treat Z and S as almost-J, while others treat Z as S and S as almost-J…) or J into an aspired-H. Possible hint/WAG: many immigrants from Morocco do this J thing as well.
-
how did Latin beget Spanish. Does Latin include the K, Z and S sounds? How much was it influenced by Basque, how much by other “old tribe” languages form the area (Iberian, Vascongados, others), how much by the Germanic tribes who passed by on their way to Africa (Vandals, Alanes (sp?)), how much by the Germanic tribe who stayed in the Peninsula (Visigoths)? When documents from areas which still used Latin in writing when Navarra was already using Spanish refer to “Lingua Navarrorum” with disdain, are they talking about Basque, or about Spanish?
This last question has been keeping linguists busy pretty much since the science started being studied in Spain.
I do know that, while I was taught some Latin, I was never taught Latin phonetics or intonation: we would read it as if it was in Spanish (thus, Cicero is either <Zizero> or <Sisero>) and I’ve heard it pronounced differently by people with other first languages (<Kikero>). How did Quintus Tullius Cicero pronounce it, I don’t know. Do we have any documents decrying “the mispronunciations of those damned provincials”?
Just for a close comparison point and extra fun, Catalan (another one of Spain’s Romance languages) doesn’t have the Z but it has two S (sonora and suave, sonorous and soft). I’m not familiar with Galego phonetics; Basque is a pre-roman language and it has a lot of different almost-s sounds, but we don’t have any information about how it was pronounced in Visigoth times.
Oh: the :smack: in my first post wasn’t for you, bufftabby. It was me hitting my head against the desk. I never use it to mean I’m smacking others…
You’re right, Nava, in that my “at home, with friends” Spanish is different to the one I used when I was in school or talking to strangers. But my point still stands, that my seseo IS accepted formally, so I do not have to make any effort to correct it (and I don’t), as I would with the other quirks I mentioned (ie, dropping the “s” at the end of syllables).
And again, while your “standard Spanish” is considered correct by the RAE, the RAE also recognizes that the seseo is perfectly formal and not “lazy speak”.
Nava, right, but I didn’t see anything I said to be headsmack-worthy. I asked a question, and mucked up none of it, save that I didn’t know the difference was only applicable to C and Z (which is why I referred to it in the title as the s sound, understanding that it might only be applicable in certain situations). I don’t see it as a dumb question, which is what the headsmack implied to me, coupled with the bit about “standard” not counting as a “dialect,” although it in fact does.
guizot, yes, perhaps “facts” was a misleading word. I should’ve said “generally accepted conjecture” or something. Most of the historical linguistic stuff I’ve studied relates to Modern English and its descent from Middle and Old English, where there seem to be somewhat more definitive answers (ie t to d, p to b, shifts etc) that can be associated with particular timespans blah blah blah. By facts I mostly meant “don’t gimme no claptrap about that damn king with a lisp, cause I aint stupid”. 
[PSYCHOLOGIST]You seem to have very strong feelings about this “damn king with a lisp…” Would you like to share more about your feelings toward him?[/PSYCHOLOGIST]
I assume that when you ask “how,” you’re specifically referring to population migration. And I guess that’s what you’re interested in. Nava has already addressed that. As for English /t/, you know that it has more than two allophones, right? (At least in the States.) The problem is that it’s hard to know when and where all this happened, because we can’t hear how people spoke. We can only trace back migrations and compare with current U.S. regional pronunciation. That’s difficult, though, because the U.S. has been such a highly mobile population. I’d be curious what your study group has come up with.