- cross-posted to:
- xkcd@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- xkcd@lemmy.world
cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/15125500
xkcd #2942: Fluid Speech
Alt text:
Thank you to linguist Gretchen McCulloch for teaching me about phonetic assimilation, and for teaching me that if you stand around in public reading texts from a linguist and murmuring example phrases to yourself, people will eventually ask if you’re okay.
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This is one of those “weird” (in a good way) posts that could go well either here or in !linguistics_humor@sh.itjust.works. Randall Munroe typically researches the stuff well enough so his comics aren’t just some empty joke.
Relevant tidbit: which gestures you’re allowed to skip and how much is fairly language-dependent. Sometimes it changes even between closely related variety. English typically has a lot of wiggling room for that due to the stress-based timing, you’re expected to reduce unstressed syllables. While Spanish for example isn’t too prone for that (it does happen, mind you; just not as much. Except if you’re Chilean.), with proficient speakers instead speaking faster.
Those simplifications often have their own names. For example, the ones shown in the comic are mostly adjacent assimilation, with a few deletions.
There’s also a qualitative difference between the first two steps and the last one: the first two have been “encoded” into the language’s morphology already, to the point that they’re productive (cue to “tryna”), so they’re a lot like the contractions nowadays. While the last one is mostly phonetic only in nature.
I can never escape the chilean diss. /j
Hey, I ain’t dissin’ Chilean varieties!
…plus my native language (Portuguese) is a lot like “Spã’ish but you’re too lazy to prõ’ounce a few softer cõsonants, so you simp’y skip them.”, accordingly to some folks.
There’s this book I really enjoy, “From Latin to Spanish” by Paul Lloyd, that goes at length on the phonological and syntactical evolution of spanish and, damn, spanish really did take quite the funky path in the evolution of its phoneme system while portuguese remained conservative in plenty of its inventory. It’s really fun to compare them and see where they diverged and how some phenomena are really quite distinctly romance, like palatalization due to a yod.
Portuguese is more conservative on analysis; like, the phonemic inventory doesn’t change that much from Continental Proto-Romance. But once you look at the surface, you find a bunch of weird stuff, like:
- a general tendency to convert /Cl/ clusters into /Cɾ/; see praia/playa, cravo/clavo, or dialectally *prástico (standard: “plástico”). You typically don’t see this much in Spanish, except in the Caribbean. It’s nowadays stigmatised but still an ongoing process in some dialects (like Caipira).
- even conservative Portuguese dialects have a tendency to shift to stress timing on quick speech, with vowel reduction and/or elision. On the other hand Spanish typically keeps itself syllable timed, even on quick speech.
- most intervocalic /l/ and /n/ are gone, except in reborrowings. Some /n/'s got regenerated as /ɲ/, but that’s from a nasal vowel splitting again into oral vowel + nasal consonant. See e.g. cor/color, coroa/corona, boa/buena.
- the nasal vowels are becoming phonemic, Lombard/French style; in some situations you can’t simply analyse, say, [ẽ] or [ə̃] as /eN/ and /aN/ any more.
- rhotics. Unlike Spanish, Portuguese never backed /ʃ/ into [x], so there was that “gap” in the phonology that got filled by /r/ instead: [r]→[ʀ ʁ ɦ x χ h], with all intermediate links popping up in some dialect. In the meantime /ɾ/ became [ɾ ɹ ɻ], with [ɻ] trying to split into a third phoneme.
There’s also a bunch of phenomena that appear in both, but got stigmatised in Portuguese and accepted in Spanish. A good example of that is yeísmo - it does pop up in Portuguese but it’s associated with rural people, and seen as “poor speech”.
Sorry for the wall of text.
No, thank you for the wall of text! I enjoy this type of discussion and even more so on spanish and portuguese.
I really find interesting the connection you make with the Caribbean dialects. There has been a great influx of venezuelans and cubans in the south of Brazil and I’m astonished by the similarities that they share with portuguese, sometimes in the choice of vocabulary, some other times in grammatical constructions, and I’ve already heard a cuban or two pronounce /r/ as is done in portuguese.
