Talk:Yeísmo

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consists in the merge of the two palatal approximant phonemes (the glide /j/ and the lateral /ʎ/) into one, and the pronunciation of both in several other ways, usually as a fricative or as an affricate. [...] Some dialects pronounce the merged palatal phoneme as [j] (a palatal approximant, as in English yet and the traditional "standard" pronunciation of y). Most dialects, however, realize this phoneme as a voiced fricative, either [ʝ] (palatal) or [ʒ] (postalveolar). In other cases, the phonetic realization is devoiced, or becomes a soft affricate sound (commonly [dʒ], as in English gin).[...]Curiously, yeísmo is not uniformly applied to words. Those words which an orthographical y or ll undergo the merge, but the word-initial rising diphthongs with the glide element represented in writing with hi keep the original pronunciation as [j]. That is, the initial phonemes of both llano "flat" and yema "yolk" are pronounced the same (with yeísmo), but hielo "ice" is not (it remains ['jelo]).

There seems to be a deep misundestanding in the above description. Spanish does not have a glide /j/ phoneme; instead, there is a consonantal phoneme which phonologically aligns with the plosive/fricative/approximant voiced obstruents (/b/, /d/, /g/) and whose pronunciation varies from dialect to dialect, the most widespread being a palatal plosive/affricate/fricative (postalveolar fricative is distinctively used in Rioplatense, and only some fringe dialect uses a glide, a feature which sounds definitely foreignish to speakers of mainstream dialects). Now, yeismo is not the merging of a lateral and a glide phoneme into a different fricative/affricate phoneme, but merely the merging and loss of the lateral phoneme into the fricative/affricate phoneme: that's why it's called yeismo, because words like "lluvia" and "llorar" get pronounced as if they were "yuvia" and "yorar". The first phoneme in "hielo" is not the fricative/affricate one (let alone the lateral), but the vowel /i/ (unlike in English, diphthongs are not phonemic units in Spanish but merely two vowels in a row within the same syllable), and in mainstream Spanish the glide sound [j] that in English is a distinct phoneme is merely the allophone of vowel /i/ used at the start of a diphthong, so that's what you hear in the (careful) pronunciation of "hielo". But note that there is a strong tendency in colloquial Spanish to avoid glides in syllable-initial diphthongs by raising them into fricative consonantal sounds, and so effectively merging "hi-" with the palatal fricative "y-" and "hu-" with the sequence "gü-" (somehow, we native speakers of mainstream Spanish dialects find that syllable-initial glides are "uncomfortable" to pronounce while the corresponding fricatives are "easier", even though native English speakers most probably would think viceversa). However, this is a different issue from yeismo altogether and the merging of "hi-" with "y-" does not occur to my knowledge in Rioplatense where the sound of "y" is not that of a palatal fricative and thus does not correspond to the raised version of the glide; this explains the erroneous perception of yeismo not being "uniformly applied to words" mentioned in the article. Uaxuctum 04:00, 7 May 2005 (UTC)

I've gone and corrected my mistakes in the article. From the beginning I thought it wasn't alright, but could get my mind around a suitable description for y, and defaulted to the traditional prescription (which is still, BTW, hammered into children's minds) that y is underlyingly [j]. I should have known better myself. However I'm still under the impression that some dialects (not fringe ones) do use [j], or something that sounds more approximant than fricative. It's curious that you mention that this phoneme aligns with the phonemic voiced stops, because in Rioplatense, while y is a rather forcefully pronounced fricative, the realization of the voiced stops has shifted from weakly fricative towards approximant, or zero (especially /d/).

Should the article mention prescriptiveness? Here in Argentina, when primary schoolteachers dictate carefully to students, they still use [j] and [λ] for y and ll, in order to show there's a difference. What's the situation in other Spanish-speaking countries?

--Pablo D. Flores 14:23, 7 May 2005 (UTC)

In Spain, we are never (to my knowledge) told to pronounce "y" as the semivowel [j]. In fact, Spaniards learning English usually replace English "y" (which definitely is /j/) with the Spanish plosive/affricate/fricative "y" (effectively merging the pronunciation of English "y" and "j"), because as mentioned above we find it "uncomfortable" to pronounce syllable-initial glides. To my ear, the sound [j] is not related in any way to the phoneme "y" so far as native-sounding speech is concerned; instead I hear it clearly as an allophone of the vowel phoneme "i". Thus, hearing it where the sound of "y" is expected is something my ear instantly detects (e.g. instead of "yo ya sé" with initial consonants, it will sound to me like "hio hia sé" with initial diphthongs) and I strongly relate it to foreign-sounding or Spanglish accent.

I think that the misrepresentation of "y" as [j] made by prescriptivist Argentinians may have to do with Rioplatense not having anything like the mainstream plosive/affricate/fricative sound of other dialects like Castilian, instead having a postalveolar "zh"-like sound, so that to an Argentinian ear the "y" of mainstream dialects (whose allophonic range goes from plosive all the way through affricate and fricative and up to very close to, though never fully, a glide) may sound closer to the palatal glide [j] allophone of "i" (such as in "hielo") than to the Argentinian postalveolar fricative "zh", and so the sound of mainstream "y" may have been misidentified as [j]. Or maybe it is a product of contact with languages such as Italian and English (which could also explain the introduction of the spurious labiodental sound for orthographical "v", also mistakenly taught as "the proper pronunciation" in Argentinian schools).

As for "ll", nowadays (mostly thanks to half a century of TV broadcast throughout the country from Madrid, which had become mainly yeista long ago because of the many Andalusians that settled there) most Spaniards (certainly the immense majority of the younger generations raised outside Catalan or Basque bilingual areas) cannot for the life of them pronounce it as a palatal lateral, and we are no longer told at school to do so, so most people nowadays tend to think of it as an archaic thing not belonging to the present language, not even to that of educated people. In fact, yeismo is already so deeply rooted, that many people over here usually refer improperly to the plosive/affricate/fricative phoneme "y" as "the sound of ll" because for them orthographic "ll" is always pronounced that way (unlike orthographic "y" which corresponds to vowel "i" in cases like "y hoy hay una ley").

As for the alignment of phoneme "y" with "b/d/g", in Castilian there is an underlying symmetry and regularity in the obstruent consonants:

               LABIAL            DENTAL         ALVEOLOPALATAL        GUTTURAL
         |  bilab  labiod  |  interd   dent  | apicoalv   palat |  velar    uvul  |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
tense    |    p            |             t   |             ch   |  c/qu/k         |
lax      |   b/v           |             d   |             y    |   g(u)          |
spirant  |            f    |    c/z          |     s            |            j/g  |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Note that the "tense" item in each order features only one main allophone, which is tense, voiceless and involves plosivity (either pure or affricated). Each "lax" item features two allophones (let's call them the "fortis" and "lenis" ones), with a distribution of:

- fortis allophone in initial and postnasal position (pronounced with a lax voiced sound featuring plosivity, either pure or affricated, e.g. in "ambos", "donde", "cónyuge", "tengo")

- lenis allophone elsewhere (pronounced with a lax voiced sound featuring varying degrees of lenition from fricative to approximant, to near or total loss when syllable- and especially word-final)

Finally, each "spirant" item features a main tense voiceless allophone, and a secondary tense voiced allophone when followed by a voiced consonant (as in "afgano", "hallazgo", "desde", "reloj grande"). Also, notice the "displacement" of the spirants in each order with respect to the non-spirant items, and that the apicoalveolar nature of Castilian "s" (which makes it feature a slight sh-like acoustic quality when compared with laminoalveolar and dental sibilants) and the presence of the interdental sibilant "c/z", makes this "s" fit well in the alveolopalatal order.

Alas, this neat organization of the Castilian obstruents is destabilized in seseante/ceceante dialects where "c/z" and "s" are merged, and where the pronunciation of certain items changed (such as the de-affrication of "ch" into "sh" in Andalusia and the Caribbean; and the turning of "y" into a "zh"-like, more recently devoiced into "sh", always-fricative sound in Rioplatense, because of substratum from indigenous Tupi-Guarani languages if I'm not mistaken). This can lead to rearrangements in order to restore some symmetry, like that of Andalusian, where the alveolopalatal order, now featuring only two items, detatches from the main obstruent paradigm to form its own paradigm based in a voicing constrast of fricatives (voiceless "ch" pronounced as fricative "sh" vs. yeista voiced fricative "y/ll"). Uaxuctum 16:54, 7 May 2005 (UTC)

This is extremely interesting. Have you checked whether this information is present in any of the articles related to Spanish phonology? I wish it could be integrated somewhere. BTW, what the immediately above means is that the Rioplatense system is rather scr-- ah... disbalanced. The explanation you give about my confusion is of course true; when I hear a palatal y (in the non-Rioplatense dialects I'm exposed to on TV, mostly) my ear approximates it to [j]. As for confusion in other languages, English y and j are both most often pronounced sh over here, even by English-knowledgeable people when speaking it carelessly; however, most get initial English [j] right easily, when they bother. --Pablo D. Flores 10:45, 9 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Generalized

Isn't it generalized except among bilingual speakers of Catalan and Quechua?

No, there are still non-yeístas in other places like Paraguay, Colombia and the Philippines (even though the indigenous languages of those areas do not feature the palatal lateral), as well as in other areas in Spain, particularly in rural areas in northern Castile and other northern parts of the country and also among those who grew up in said areas or in families from said areas but who now live in big cities. I meet some of them from time to time, and a few well-known Spanish media voices are non-yeísta, such as Iñaki Gabilondo and someone else whose name I can't recall but who routinely dubs many of the documentaries that are broadcast on TVE-2. But ever more in Spain the distinction is becoming restricted to older speakers who grew up hearing it; the younger generations are too influenced by the language they hear on radio and TV, which is mostly yeísta because for many decades most of it has been originating from Madrid, which became a radiating focus of yeísmo long ago. To my dismay, I've even heard of originally non-yeísta people who have renounced to making the distinction they learned from childhood, so as to not sound "odd" among the yeísta crowd in places like Madrid. However, I am one of the unfortunately-not-so-many who proudly keeps the distinction despite the sociolinguistic pressure of surrounding yeístas; in fact, I'm a fan of the palatal lateral and don't like yeísmo at all, I personally find it sounds just ugly. This reference describes the areas in Latin America that keep the distinction. It also mentions the difference between yeísmo confundidor (the merger of ll with y, which is what yeísmo usually refers to) and yeísmo distinguidor (where ll has lost its lateral feature, becoming a rehilado sound like Rioplatense ll/y, but is still distinguished from the non-rehilado sound of y); something should be added to the article regarding these two kinds of yeísmo. Uaxuctum 00:31, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Mallorca

Has this anything to do with why Majorca is written "Mallorca" rather than "Mayorca"? --Henrygb 23:16, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

Nope, its about pronunciation, not writing. LL and Y are (where?) supposed to have different sounds, but they are very often pronunced the same. Mariano(t/c) 08:35, 5 June 2006 (UTC)

But might it be a phonetic transcription error hearing the Latin maior or major and taking it to be ll rather than y? --Henrygb 10:01, 5 June 2006 (UTC)

Yes, I have found this reference confirming that the etymologically anomalous form "Mallorca" is a by-product of ieisme—a hypercorrected form due to a mistaken interpretation that speakers of continental Catalan made of the ieisme etimològic that is characteristic of the Balearic speech: Diccionari català-valencià-balear, Institut d'Estudis Catalans (look up the term "Mallorca"): "La forma catalana antiga era Maiorca, i d'aquesta pronúncia trobam deixalles en les antigues grafies Mayorca i Mayorques; però com en la majoria dels casos en què el mallorquí té una i intervocàlica, el català de Barcelona té una ll (com orella oreia, palla paia, etc.), la i de Maiorca fou interpretada pels catalans continentals com un dialectalisme mallorquí, al qual ells oposaren la pronúncia Mallorca, i aquesta, predominant en l'escriptura, acabà per imposar-se fins i tot als mateixos mallorquins. Aquesta és l'explicació, completament satisfactòria, que del canvi de Maiorca en Mallorca donà B. Schädel en Rev. Dial. Rom., i, 267." (translation: "The old Catalan form was Maiorca, and we find remnants of this pronunciation in the old spellings Mayorca and Mayorques; but given that in the majority of cases where the Majorcan dialect has an intervocalic i, Barcelonian Catalan has an ll (e.g., orella/oreia, palla/paia, etc.), the i in Maiorca was interpreted by continental Catalans as a Majorcan dialectal form, to which they opposed the pronunciation Mallorca, and this one, prevalent in the written form, got finally imposed on the very Majorcans. This is the explanation, completely satisfactory, that Bernhard Schädel gave for the change from Maiorca to Mallorca in Revue de Dialectologie Romane, tome i, page 267.") Uaxuctum 15:29, 13 February 2007 (UTC)