"The Vagaries of the Spanish "S

T HERE IS THE STORY of the native Spanish teacher explaining to his class how to form the plural of nouns and adjectives. is very simple, he said, just add an s. For example: el > lo f6foro (el f6sforo > los f6sforos). It reminds me of my school teacher in Chile, warning us: no se coman lah ese ('no se coman Las eses'). I think that s is the most unpredictable, elusive, shifting, erratic and troublesome sound in the Spanish language. Several studies on Spanish phonology and dialects touch on this subject, so I shall recapitulate pertinent information which is already known, but I also propose to add, to elaborate, to correct, to disagree, and to theorize based on my own findings and observations.1 There is a Castilian s, which is a voiceless, concave, apicoalveolar fricative: the tip of the tongue turned upward forms a narrow opening against the alveoli of the upper incisors. It resembles a faint / S / and is found throughout much of the northern half of Spain. And there is a convex, dorsal, dento-alveolar voiceless fricative s, found in the half, mainly in the Audalusian region. This southern s has two varieties: one in which the tip of the tongue is lowered until it leans against the inner side of the lower incisors: it is the s of Malaga, Seville and Cddiz; the other, less dorsal and less convex, is obtained by forming a narrow opening against the upper teeth and alveoli with the predorsal and ridge of the tongue. It is the s of Granada, Huelva, Cordova, Jad4n and Almeria.2 The Latin American s resembles the southern s (Andalusian type), although slight variations can be noticed within a country or from one country to the other.3 Navarro Tomas says that la s apical de tipo castellano, con variantes tambitn, se usa, seguin las pocas noticias que sobre esto tenemos, en parte de M6jico, de Antillas y del Peru.4 I have also heard it rather currently in Bogoti

Linguistics · Basque language and culture studies · History · Philosophy · Phonetics and Phonology Research · Spanish Linguistics and Language Studies

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