I could not find this on a search, but it may have been addressed. The Spaniards I heard in Spain use a “th” sound for the letter “c.” For example, I heard “Barthelona,” instead of Barcelona. Or “Valenthia” instead of Valencia. Google was not much help. Do linquists study this? Why the difference from the way Mexicans or others pronounce Spanish?
Here’s another site.
I’ve met many people in Spain who pronounce Bar.c.elona instead of Bar.th.elona. My family doesn’t pronounce the lisp either.
Spanish people may similarly ask the same question, why do englishmen pronounce their C’s hard? Remember, theres no innate right pronociation for a given letter, its a completely arbitrary mapping.
Oops…I wasn’t clear enough there: They don’t just limit it to Barcelona, of course.
I learned Castellano - el espanol de Espana - by virtue of the fact that both of my Spanish teachers spoke Castellano, even though the books, tapes, etc., we used were in American Spanish*. My first teacher was Spanish - she was born and raised in Barcelona, which she pronounced as “bar-theh-LO-nah” - and my second teacher learned Spanish in England and lived in Spain for a number of years.
“C” is not the only letter affected. “Z” and “d” are affected too. “Z” is pronounced as “th” (as in “thing”), and in certain cases “d” is pronounced as “dh” (like the “th” in “the”).
Plus, “v” is always pronounced as “b.”
Personally, I prefer Castellano to American Spanish. I can speak and understand it better. Personalmente, prefiero Castellano a causa de que puedo hablarlo y entenderlo major que espanol americano. (Perdoneme si mi espanol no es correcto. Habia mucho tiempo que lo usaba.)
*American in reference to the American continent(s), not the United States of America. May be called Mexican Spanish.
WRS
Do you have any samples of this “d” sound in Spanish, I can’t think of any instance.
And what about the Brazillian Portuguese pronunciation of “R”?? Royce Gracie is pronounced Hoyce Gracie. The first “R” of Royce is an “H” sound, but the “r” in “Gracie” is pronounced “r”.
An example of the “d” is the pronunciation of “dedo” as “detho.” It’s an intervocalic phenomenon, meaning that “d” equals “th” when “d” is sandwiched between two vowels.
People in Barcelona pronounce it with the ‘c’. They are Catalans, and thus do not have the Castilian lisp.
Hmm, I’m a native Spanish speaker, and I even lived in Spain for a couple of years, and this is the first I hear of this. Dedo is dedo, unless you’re in Andalucia in which case is “deo”. Sorry.
bayonet1976, intervocalic and sylabbic-final “d” (“oid” = hear ye) gets the “soft d” sound in many regional accents of Spanish. It’s such a subtle variation that schoolkids are not formally taught about it when learning to read.
Then there’s the case of v = b. Indeed, the Standard rule is that you do not differentiate pronunciation. However, by that same “standard”, our “b” is a subtly softer sound than in English – your lips never quite shut the airflow. In much of Mexico/Central Am/Caribbean , dialect actually goes the other way and both get pronounced with the upper teeth/lower lip, like English “v” .
Spanish dialects vary even more than English ones do. (Plus, Gallego – spoken in the extreme northwest of Spain, north of Portugal – and Catalan – spoken along the northern Mediterranean coast and some ways inland – are regarded as distinct languages.)
Ceismo (pronounced theismo, with the obvious homonymy with the Spanish for “theism”) is the conversion of the “s” sound expected to an unvoiced “th” in the Castilian dialect – which is “the King’s Spanish” in the same way that the speech of upper-class southwest England is “the King’s English.” It’s almost never heard in New World Spanish. The voiced “th” for intervocalic “D” is quite a bit more widespread, but by no means universal (see bayonet1976’s post just above). There are other dialects in Spain and throughout Hispanic America.
To cite another example, the “LL” combination varies as well. In Castilian and significant parts of Spanish-speaking America (Costa Rica, where one of my teachers was from, comes to mind) it is sounded as “LY” – a palatalized L, carrying a consonantal “Y”
to affect the following vowel. (Compare the standard English pronounciations of “lieu” and “loo” for the difference.) In much of Hispanic America (and I believe Andalucia) the “L” is elided, and it sounds like a “Y,” sometimes with the slightest hint of a “L” in front, as in the Northeast U.S. sounding of “milk” as /me[sup]L[/sup]k/ --the E technically being a 3-like symbol representing an “eh” sound. And in the Cono Sur – Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay – it’s changed again to a sound closely resembling a hard “J” – the Spanish for 1,000,000, “millon” would in these usages be /meal-YOAN/, /mee-YOAN/, and /mee-JOAN/ respectively.
I do really need to elaborate: in some regional speech people will pronounce, for instance, the first and last letter of “David” slightly different, because otherwise trying to close with the exact sound and no vowel after would sound to their ears, and feel to their tongues, like they’re saying “Davit”. It’s so subtle it’s almost unconscious. Otherwise, yes, “d” is “d”
Right, I forgot to say that not all Spanish speakers voice the intervocalic D. But that was how I learned it in my Spanish class (from a Persian, no less).
It’s always hard to map the sounds from one language to that of another. The “th” sound that “d” takes on between vowels or at the end of word is not the same as the “th” sound in English. And, BTW, “th” can be pronounced two different ways in English, such as “That” or “This” vs “With” or “Thing” (ie, voiced or not voiced). Engish used to have two different letters to denote those sounds, but you only find them preserved in Icelandic. I’m sure someone will come along who knows how to print those symbols-- I don’t.
Actually, you’d be hard pressed to find anther language that pronounes a written “th” as it is pronounced in English. That is why we mispronounce “Neanderthal” (the older spelling of German “Neandertal”). In most languages where you see “th” the “h” is usded to modify the “t” sound slightly, not to turn the two letters into a completely different sound.
Don’t let people fool you. It’s not a lisp first off. The only reason we pronounce c before e or i sometimes (in english i mean) as a S is because of French. Secondly, thats the way it evolved. Z is also pronounce the same way. In latin, c represented the k sound, that evolved into a ts sound which became t which became th. Z was a dz sound in latin if I remember right, which got carried over into old castilian too. As castilian evolved into modern castilian, dz became ts just like c before e and i and then it became t and th. I believe the th appeard first, but like that evolved in southern spain ts became s and that stuck and basically got carried over to mexico sentral and south america. Hope I helped and if you ahve anymore questions just ask, but I don’t have my Que bien suena book with me so you might have to wait ofr me to get back home if you want any questions answered, i remember most of it, i know i’m that big of a linguistic nerd, sorry i rambled but agian any questions ask me. If i don’t know the answer I ask my much more knowledgable professor (he’s a certified dialectologist). Laters.
If they’re from spain it might because catalan is there first language and c before e and i doesn’t represent the theta sound.
Or they’re from Mexico, Central or South america.
Sorry I gotta say it, castellano is the language, there’s more than one dialect of spain, and none of them is called español castellano. Castellano is the first name of the lnaguage, and linguistically speaking, it’s the best name for the language. Don’t get mad. Both the dialects in spain and in mexico, central and south america are all part of the Castilian language. Some call it español, but as far as I can see, we the majority call it castellano. But the dialect you refer to is probably castellano septentrional. Pues ya sabéis. I don’t know wanted to clear that up.
Zombieths.