A language learners’ forum

FWIW I feel like this weakening of /b/, /d/ and /g/ in European Portuguese is done a lot less consistently than in Spanish or Catalan. I don't think I've ever heard a native speaker of any variety of Spanish fail to turn them into approximants in an environment where it's supposed to happen, even in extra careful speech, whereas my impression from listening to European Portuguese has been as if it only ever happens around 50% of the time, even when the speech isn't particularly carefully enunciated.

Sae's post about Tuvan and Mongolian reminded me of this iceberg meme about the relationship between Kazakh orthography and pronunciation. Interestingly the strongest objections in the responses seem to come from people writing in Russian, which fits with my experiences of learning Kazakh in a Russian-medium school where telling Russian-speaking kids that in Kazakh "everything is pronounced exactly as spelled" may be a hypercorrective measure to make sure that they don't transfer Russian vowel reduction into Kazakh. The only discrepancies between spelling and pronunciation I remember being explicitly taught about are the bel/sal contrast shown right under the surface on the image (from the Russian point of view the two final L's are pronounced differently, with the L after a front vowel pronounced "soft" and the one after a back vowel pronounced "hard" - or "light" and "dark" in English terminology) and the rounded vowel harmony - the latter of which was only brought up around seventh grade, on the teacher's own initiative, with a lot of my classmates reacting to this "new" rule quite negatively (by contrast, here's a second grade reader for Kazakh-medium schools where this feature is explicitly pointed out on page 5).

One pronunciation rule that I was never explicitly taught is that the vowels o and ö were preceded by a w-like semivowel in the beginning of the word, which suddenly made the connection between the Kazakh otan and the Arabic waṭan a lot more apparent to me. Another thing I noticed listening to native speakers is that the soft/hard L rule had one exception in that the L was still pronounced the "soft" way even in back vowel environments when it was immediately preceded by the semivowel /j/ - this effect is demonstrated in the meme by respelling sailau from сайлау to сайляу. Apparently the frontedness of /j/ makes it a lot easier to use the light [l] immediately after it, but a lot of people still go out of their way to use the dark [ɫ] just because the word as a whole is supposed to be "hard" - as did I, until very recently.

What's more, the example of şailar pronounced as if spelled şäilär seems to suggest that sometimes the softness of the consonants forces the vowels to front, switching the whole vowel harmony paradigm for the word. Indeed the other example in the image seem to suggest that the relatively fronted consonants /ʃ/ and /ʒ/ also tend to have this effect, which would be counterintuitive for a Russian speaker since we tend to pronounce those consonants like the much harder /ʂ/ and /ʐ/ (while Kazakh teachers in Russian schools do spend a lot of time explaining the pronunciations of Kazakh letters not used in Russian, they barely say anything about the ways shared letters are pronounced differently).

Okay, at some point this transformed into a rant more appropriate for "Lies my Beginner Courses Taught Me"

vonPeterhof wrote:Another thing I noticed listening to native speakers is that the soft/hard L rule had one exception in that the L was still pronounced the "soft" way even in back vowel environments even when it was immediately preceded by the semivowel /j/ - this effect is demonstrated in the meme by respelling sailau from сайлау to сайляу. Apparently the frontedness of /j/ makes it a lot easier to use the light [l] immediately after it, but a lot of people still go out of their way to use the dark [ɫ] just because the word as a whole is supposed to be "hard" - as did I, until very recently.

I notice the same thing happen quite often in Tatar verbs (and their derivatives) "уйлау" (think) and "уйнау" (play) in regular speech. It's not 100% consistent, I'm not sure I've ever heard it in other verbs or words, but it's definitely there (it's especially common with "уйлау"). I've never encountered any mention of this phonetic peculiarity of Tatar in phonetic descriptions or discussions, but I can clearly hear it.

Dragon27 wrote:I notice the same thing happen quite often in Tatar verbs (and their derivatives) "уйлау" (think) and "уйнау" (play) in regular speech. It's not 100% consistent, I'm not sure I've ever heard it in other verbs or words, but it's definitely there (it's especially common with "уйлау"). I've never encountered any mention of this phonetic peculiarity of Tatar in phonetic descriptions or discussions, but I can clearly hear it.

Yeah this sounds plausible to me. I also just now remembered at least one Kazakh loanword into Russian where this is reflected - джайляу (also note how the spelling implies the pronunciation [d͡ʒ] on the first consonant, which is pretty common in spoken Kazakh but considered non-standard). I used to think that this was just a sort of hyperforeignism due to how we tend to assume that L sounds in most languages are closer to our "soft L".

Crojo wrote::o

I feel like my brain has been taken apart, cleaned, oiled, and put back together.

Something similar seems to happen in Spanish but Spanish-speakers that I've met in person, native or foreign, tell me I'm wrong. Every standard pronunciation guide that I've read, too, insists that every letter is always pronounced in the same way. Spanish pronunciation is certainly more uniform than English. But the letters do not always sound the same. At least to my ears.

What happens is that those native speakers you've met simply didn't know a thing about phonetics / pronunciation, and to be fair to them, it is hard for the linguistically naïve to even notice details in how people produce a sound at all. (For that matter, the teachers I had who taught me English as a foreign language didn't teach me much about English pronunciation, likely because they didn't know much themselves, much to my later frustration.)

Two examples that come up mind are:
1. …n/m p/b… (e.g. 'en plan' sounds like 'em plan')
2. While 'b' and 'v' sound the same and are roughly interchangeable, there is a sound that's closer to the English 'b' and a sound that's closer to the English 'v', but it depends on where the 'b'/'v' is positioned rather than the fact that a word is spelled with a 'b' or a 'v'.

I'm just adding myself to the choir here, but yes, "en plan" sounds like "em plan".

And yes, b/v are spelled etymologically. The choice of written b vs. v mostly depends on how the word was originally spelled in ancient Latin, with b used for most Arabic words, plus some exceptions. Both enviar and cambiar have a sound like that of English b, but we write v for enviar because it's derived from Latin via 'road, path, way' (in-vi(a)-āre), and we write b for cambiar because it comes from Latin cambīre 'to exchange'.

As for the sound of b/v, in most dialects you use the sound close to English b after a pause or after m/n (¡ven!, un buen bote, enviar, cambiar), and the sound close to v after a vowel or the other consonants (a ver, por veces, el bazo, caber, cueva, árbol, salvar), but note there is some dialectal variation (I'm from El Salvador and I use the b-like sound after an L, as in El Salvador, which sounds like elsalbaDOR when I say it, but many other native speakers would say elsalvaDOR).

So here I am, a native speaker telling you you're right. Happy you've met me now?

Querneus wrote:So here I am, a native speaker telling you you're right. Happy you've met me now?

I am indeed, and glad to have read your comment, thank you. I did not know about the Latin root determining the use of b/v – this will surely come in handy. (I had suspected that Spanish was a Romance language.)

Now I'm wondering if we know why Latin sometimes used b rather than v. Maybe loanwords kept the b if there was one?

And to bring this back to the video that started all this, whether Latin pronunciation changes in the same way as English and Spanish.


Cainntear, perhaps you know? If

Cainntear wrote:… there is a tendency for languages to either have weak vowels or have weak consonants, but usually an either/or choice, because weakening both is normally a step too far[,]

then the answer may depend on whether Latin had weak vowels or consonants. Unless Latin was closer to Catalan:

Cainntear wrote:This actually makes me wonder about Catalan -- the tendency to weaken consonants... is that a borrowing from Spanish, or was it always there?

Is Spanish or Catalan a truer representation of this phenomena in Latin?

Cainntear wrote:I have literally only read this once (during an Open University course that taught linguistics through closely examining English, I believe, so I have confidence in it) and have never seen it repeated: there is a tendency for languages to either have weak vowels or have weak consonants, but usually an either/or choice, because weakening both is normally a step too far. In English, consonants must be fully realised because our vowels aren't; in Spanish, vowels must be fully realised because consonants aren't.

Just to double check, have you only ever seen (i) the weak vowel/consonant thesis once? or (ii) one e.g. textbook claim that Spanish letters are always pronounced the same way? I think you mean (i), but if you mean (ii), I've been terribly unlucky (or I severely lack attention to detail – not an impossibility).

Either way, the weak vowel/consonant idea is useful, thank you.

To bring it back to the video in the OP, which seemed to focus on changes in the way that consonants are pronounced. Is there any correlation between this and the idea that English has weak vowels but strong consonants? Would a language with weak consonants and strong vowels be more likely to have changes in the pronunciation of vowels?

Crojo wrote:Now I'm wondering if we know why Latin sometimes used b rather than v. Maybe loanwords kept the b if there was one?

B and V (closer to a “w” sound early on) were separate sounds in Latin. Spanish lost the B / V distinction in speech but kept it in orthography.