Talk:Phonological history of Spanish coronal fricatives

message: It would be good to document this, and really emphasize that it is in fact false. Does anyobdy have sources? And the argumentation in the current article is incomplete: Yes, it is easy to see that a speech impediment would not give rise to the more widespread Peninsular pronunciation (which has both  and ), but that is not the topic of the article. The ceceo pronounciation is consistent with a lisp, so someone could be tempted to believe this "King" explanation, unless we find some solid sources to disprove it. CapnPrep 18:55, 19 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm sorry but I disagree. First, the 'urban legend' on the surface is absurd. Second, it is up to the person making a claim to provide evidence in general. The claim is just repeated without evidence because, of course, there isn't any. Third, there is a clear progression of sound changes leading to all current outcomes. See Spanish dialects and varieties. mnewmanqc 02:25, 20 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Wait, but I agree with you! (I think.) But I wish the article would be more authoritative about this, because otherwise it just perpetuates the myth. Ideally, it should say (i) this is where the myth first started, (ii) this is how we know it's false, and (iii) this is the real historical explanation for ceceo. At the moment it does (iii) OK, but then it mentions this myth with no source and then only partially debunks it. It should be possible to verify if there was any Spanish king with a lisp. Otherwise can we just remove it? CapnPrep 03:06, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

text: (iii) is better than nothing. I think it would take considerable research to locate the source of the legend, if it can be done. However, I think there was something on Snopes.com, but I couldn't find it when I looked. If you wanna try Capn, I think you should.
This comment addresses (ii). In addition to the observation that an uncontrollable lisp would merge, rather than perpetuate distinction of, pairs such as casa, caza, there are two major points to be brought out with regard to the legend of the king's lisp, and neither has anything to do with whether any king actually lisped or not: 1) where the /s/ ~ /θ/ distinction exists, it is predictable by historical phonology (and thus corresponds to similarly predictable distinctions that developed in other Romance languages on the same etymological basis, such as Italian /kasa/ 'house', /kattʃa/ 'hunting'); 2) that the speech of one person could change the pronunciation of an entire speech community systematically throughout the lexicon, and be perpetuated by subsequent generations, is sociolinguistically preposterous. There are other considerations, but weaving just those two together puts a stake through the heart of the myth of the king's lisp playing any role in the /s/ ~ /θ/ distinction. David Pharies' A Brief History of the Spanish Language (2007) has a good little section focused on this.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.162.77.97 (talk) 15:55, 1 June 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Urban legend about King 

message: The first step away from that system was to fricativize the dentoalveolar affricates.
Not only is that one of the most grotesque sentences I have ever read, but the word "fricativize" has just overtaken "usufruct" and "palimpsest" in my personal list of the ugliest words in the English language.  JackofOz 13:13, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Do you prefer spirantize? mnewmanqc 14:03, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

text: So how do you propose to rephrase it? Or your rant was just a childish tantrum over a word you disliked? Uaxuctum 07:34, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Grotesque sentence

message: I did a major cleanup. Hope everyone likes the results. There were some difficult passages and redundancies. Hopefully, it reads better now. I also added a reference Hualde, although it would be good to find one for the historical evolution that was recently added. mnewmanqc 17:05, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: major cleanup

message: There may be a grain of truth in the story, however, since Pedro of Castile (14th century) did "lisp a little" ("ceceaba un poco"), according to the chronicler López de Ayala (noted by Lundeberg 1947, citing Schuchardt 1881)
So what? What evidence is there that Pedro of Castile had any effect on the pronunciation of Spanish? FilipeS 18:35, 9 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The reference is not obscure, and it's certainly worth mentioning. Schuchardt apparently suggests that the king's pronunciation may have been a conscious affectation (an ideal situation for prestige spreading), and Lundeberg says that the king's speech could have reinforced an existing tendency to use /θ/. Of course there is no evidence, and the article still stays firmly on the skeptical side. CapnPrep 19:18, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

text: I think it is appropriate to mention other people's "efabulations" as long as they are relevant and documented, and that is definitely the case here. The current version of the article is more balanced than the earlier one, which seemed to suggest that people totally made up the whole idea of a lisping king. It is important to acknowledge that, actually, there is some historical basis to the story after all; it would be dishonest to conceal this fact just because we suspect that the rest of the story is false. CapnPrep 20:01, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

text: The goal of the article is to prove "exactly zero". The article is only supposed to summarize what's been said in the literature on this topic, and like it or not, this is something that has been said in the literature on this topic. The citations are from an article called "What is Ceceo?" — so the relevance of the anecdote is verifiable. And who is this going to potentially offend? (I mean, how is it worse than the previous version?) CapnPrep 21:27, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

text: Let's not get lost in  medieval morass here. Pedro was lisping or not well before the advent of the dental fricative pronunciation unless my poor history of Spanish professor was all wrong, which I doubt. If he was described as lisping by contemporaries, I do not know how they could use that word. It would mean something like tsetseando, which would imply (Monty Python and the holy grail like) the presence of sleeping sickness in Castille. :) Total: I think we should leave out the 19th cent. German reference. mnewmanqc 23:41, 9 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I hope it doesn't really need saying, but most of the people who bring up this urban legend (myself included) are not consumed by crude anti-Spanish hatred. It is true, however, that some "seseístas" find Peninsular pronunciation comical, and this silly urban legend serves their purposes very nicely. Which is probably one reason why it is so widespread, and which is why it should definitely be discussed in this article, and refuted as completely as possible. If scholars have traced the origins of the story back to Pedro I, then the whole thing is easily falsified as being a couple of centuries off the mark. I continue to believe that stating these relevant, documented facts in the article is more effective than just pointing to a Linguist List summary and About.com. (I am willing to part with the second-hand Schuchardt reference — but let me say clearly that I have absolutely nothing against Germany or 19th century scholarship…) CapnPrep 01:13, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Obscure reference for Castilian lisp

message: While the article is being tweaked, I thought I should point out an inconsistency in it. In the first section, it is said that the Spanish  is either laminal or apical. But further down in the Origins section the former pronunciation is described as "dentoalveolar", which directs to a page that is not about consonant phones. Furthermore, Spanish phonology calls it "laminoalveolar or dental". FilipeS 19:12, 9 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I am a little bewildered by all the distinctions (I have tried to keep the existing content of the article, assuming that the previous contributors knew what they were talking about, but I have noticed inconsistencies wrt some sources). It is pretty clear that there are many different phonetic realizations of  among Spanish speakers (independent of the ceceo/seseo issue), so I'm not sure whether this level of detail is justifiable. But to address your particular concern, dentoalveolar is not inconsistent with either laminal or apical. I will attempt to fix the link. CapnPrep 19:26, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

text: Where do you find the inconsistency? Those terms refer to different things. "Dentoalveolar" refers to a point of articulation: the area where the upper teeth (dental pieces) meet the back of the upper gums (alveolar ridge). Whereas "laminal" and "apical" refer to the shape of the tongue and the part of it that is drawn close to the point of articulation: when "laminal" the tongue is convex (the tip curves down and the blade protudes up) and the part of it involved in the frication is the tongue blade; when "apical" the tongue is concave (the tip curves up and the blade is lowered, making this a kind of articulation halfway towards retroflex, which explains the slight sh-like quality sometimes described for this sound) and the frication is then produced at the tongue tip. Mediaeval Castilian s/ss and Modern Castilian s, as well as Colombian s/c/z, are apical alveolar (the tongue tip approaches the alveolar ridge), while Mediaeval Castilian ç/z, as well as the modern seseo kind of s/c/z, are laminal dentoalveolar (the tongue blade approaches the edge of the alveolar ridge where it meets the teeth). These two kinds of s-like sounds do not coexist in any modern dialect (because Castilian moved forward its former lamino-dentoalveolar sibilant into current non-sibilant interdental, while Andalusian lost the apico-alveolar very early and this loss was inherited in Latin American). But both sibilant sounds coexisted as distinct phonemes in late Mediaeval Castilian (ç/z vs. s/ss), and they can be heard nowadays in most dialects of Basque, together with their corresponding affricates: z vs. s as in zu "you" vs. su "fire", and ts vs. tz as in hots "noise" vs. hotz "cold" (in Biscayne the distinction in the  fricatives has been lost in favour of s while the affricate series conflates in favour of tz, and in Roncalese the z sound was moved forward deassibilating into interdental as in Modern Castilian; on the other hand, some dialects have developed voiced variants like those that existed at some stages of Mediaeval Spanish). Uaxuctum 07:27, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

text: Do you have a source for that? There are enough books around on Spanish historical grammar to settle the issue. The only problem will be that any traditional Hispanicist phonetic symbols will need to be transliterated IPA. mnewmanqc 00:57, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

text: Harris (1969) uses š, ž, and č and doesn't seem to argue for any phonetic changes in the postalveolars/palatals.  He does say that the northern /s/ and /z/ were more retroflex than in the south, though he also says that they still are retroflex in Northern Spain and I'm not sure how true that is.  — Æµ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 17:35, 26 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Inconsistency in phonetic description 

message: In the article said that the "seseo" coexist with ceceo and distinción in Canary Islands and some regions of Andalusia, wich is a great mistake because in canarian dialect "seseo" is hegemonic and there isn't any presence of distinción or ceceo in those islands. So i have changed it and now only appear the reference to Andalusia --Bentaguayre 21:25, 8 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: That may be, but it would be useful to have a reference for the location of this co-existence. mnewmanqc 00:54, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Seseo and Canary Islands

message: i've heard some speakers of european spanish and the way they pronounced z, ce, and ci was like a fusion between s and th. what regional dialect is that? andaluz?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.224.54.202 (talk) 04:34, 9 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  the lisp 

message: Since you have the old spelling for the sibillants, you should also add when the long s was used. --Error (talk) 01:10, 27 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Why? This article is not about palaeography. FilipeS (talk) 12:43, 29 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Long s

message: The bilingual Catalan-Spanish area of Spain is wrongly marked as a absence of the sound /θ/ in the map. I think the cause of it is that, in Catalan language, there is no distinction between /θ/ and /s/ sounds; but when they speak Spanish, they make the distinction. I remove the map.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.79.47.247 (talk) 17:13, 14 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: It's not so much wrong in the sense that traditional dialectology maps represent the autochthonous language only in such cases, but it is confusing to those unfamiliar with the tradition. Someone might have a few surprises upon landing in Barcelona. mnewmanqc (talk) 15:10, 15 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: The map is wrong

message: the new section titled "shesheo" has no citations and in any case some erroneous IPA usages. These need to be corrected, or the section should be eliminated until it can be correctly sourced. mnewmanqc (talk) 09:01, 18 August 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Deleted. Jɑυмe (xarrades) 15:07, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Philippine Spanish and Shesheo 

message: I think it is worth mentioning in the Introduction that 'distinction' is made in most parts of Spain AND also in Equatorial Guinea. Thank you.--86.176.36.25 (talk) 21:14, 23 April 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: I think it is not worth mentioning every variety of Spanish in the Introduction. It is worth considering creating a section later in the article for this, but any information that goes in this section will have to be verifiable. It is also worth pointing out that Equatoguinean Spanish is pretty much exclusively spoken as a second language. If people simply learn standard Peninsular Spanish in school, then it is hardly surprising or noteworthy that they speak Spanish with distinción. CapnPrep (talk) 01:22, 25 April 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Equatorial Guinea 

message: This page should be moved to Phonological history of Spanish coronal fricatives, for that is its true topic. If it were truly about "ceceo", it would discuss that only, but instead it discusses distinción, seseo, and ceceo. And it gives a full history of how the three mergers appeared. This is a phonological history article, and keeping it under this name is akin to calling this article "cot-caught merger". Pokajanje|Talk 18:08, 30 August 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: OK, as long as the redirects are kept. Jotamar (talk) 18:15, 30 August 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: That's kind of an awkward title, but I'm with Jotamar that as long as the redirects are maintained, there should be no problem. — Æµ§œš¹ [ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ] 18:30, 30 August 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: The page has been moved and the redirects fixed. Pokajanje|Talk 18:45, 30 August 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Requested Move 

message: Should this be added to List of common misconceptions?--SidiLemine 06:07, 6 September 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Why? --Jotamar (talk) 16:42, 25 September 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Common Misconception 

message: As this article is presumably aimed at ordinary English speakers, would it not help to give examples? Otherwise it is frankly too obscure and can only interest professional phoneticians.
--Hors-la-loi (talk) 11:41, 13 November 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Examples?

message: I was baffled to see affricate sounds being represented by double symbols with ligatures as they may have been represented 100 years ago. The IPA has single symbols for all of these sounds and so does unicode: [ʤ ʧ ʣ ʦ ʣ̪] etc. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jaske (talk • contribs) 12:05, 6 November 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: This representation is no longer supported by IPA, mainly because only 6 out of dozens possible affricates have their own single symbols, which is very inconsistent. Mr KEBAB (talk) 12:34, 6 November 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: Then change them. — Æµ§œš¹ [lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt] 06:11, 7 November 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't understand your response. Those symbols aren't used in this article. Mr KEBAB (talk) 13:22, 7 November 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: Oh I misread the situation. I thought you had identified ligatures in the article and were complaining about them. The OP did not provide a signature and misused the term "ligature." — Æµ§œš¹ [lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt] 15:18, 7 November 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: No problem. I always replace the ligatures just like you do. Mr KEBAB (talk) 15:22, 7 November 2016 (UTC)

text: Yes, they have. Just look at the latest IPA chart. Do you see a mention of ligaures? They were superseded at the Kiel Convention of 1989, see the Handbook of the International Phonetic Association or the History of the International Phonetic Alphabet article. (It seems, however, this decision is not vigorously enforced. It is not uncommon to see ligatures still in textbooks and sometimes even in JIPA papers, presumably because of the authors' preference. But there's no reason for us to deviate from the official IPA.) Nardog (talk) 03:41, 17 June 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Why do you use archaic symbols with ligatures for affricates? 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Under "Castilian Lisp" the article claims:
For native speakers of seseo varieties of Spanish, in which /θ/ is absent, the presence of this phoneme in European speakers does not appear strange. However, it might be striking for learners of Spanish in North America, where people are more familiar with seseo pronunciation, and indeed gives an impression of "lispiness". 
I disagree. I've met many Latinos from a variety of countries, and they all think "ceceo" sounds strange or funny. I checked the Spanish version of this article and there is no mention of opinions of "ceceo" or "seseo," so I suggest taking out the comment above unless someone wants to find a study that documents the opinion. DBlomgren (talk) 03:32, 8 September 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: A few years back I got into conversation with a very intelligent Chilean who spoke good English and was working for a Ph.D. in London. The matter of the use of /θ/ in Spain came up in the course of the conversation and he said that it sounded ridiculous to him. A survey of one person maybe, but it bears out what you, , are saying. LynwoodF (talk) 11:51, 8 September 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: Distinción is not ceceo! --2001:16B8:316D:D000:3879:3B35:6D05:9FFC (talk) 02:50, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Agreed, but this discussion is about the use of /θ/ in general. I have no evidence to support the contention that it does not sound strange to speakers of varieties of Spanish which do not have the phoneme. My example suggests the opposite. LynwoodF (talk) 09:04, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Doesn't sound strange to Latinos? 

message: I notice that information contained in the text and tables in this section is inconsistent with what is claimed earlier in the article about the exact pronunciation of these consonants in the seseo and ceceo areas. I do not have the books mentioned in the citations, and so I am unable to give an opinion on which parts of the article are correct. LynwoodF (talk) 14:27, 22 March 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Sorry for answering so late. Could you be more specific about those inconsistencies? --Jotamar (talk) 17:44, 10 April 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Source of confusion 

message: "For native speakers of seseo varieties, in which /θ/ is absent, the presence of this phoneme in speakers of European Spanish does not appear strange. However, non-native speakers who are studying Spanish, and who learn the seseo pronunciation, may misinterpret it as lisping.[citation needed]" That's just an opinion. remove it.2803:C600:5115:D29F:A513:DEF5:F683:AE85 (talk) 23:20, 29 January 2024 (UTC)
thread_title: What is this