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From: deb5@midway.uchicago.edu (Daniel von Brighoff)
Subject: Re: Spanish pronunciation tips wanted
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Date: Tue, 11 Jun 1996 05:30:36 GMT
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In article <4phv07$l2h@qualcomm.com>, Jill Lundquist <jill@qualcomm.com> wrote:
>In article <4okjop$pbs@netsrv2.spss.com>,
>Mark Rosenfelder <markrose@spss.com> wrote:
>[on pronouncing Spanish]
>>My advice would be: first, make sure your vowels are correct.  Spanish
>>dialects vary mostly in the consonants, so if your consonants are a bit
>>off it may just sound to a native speaker like a different dialect,
>>but if your vowels are wrong you'll definitely sound like a foreigner.
>
>I'm glad to hear some confirmation of this.  I've recently returned
>from my first visit to Spain, where I was in Madrid, Sevilla, and
>Salamanca.  I heard great differences in the uses of consonants and
>absolutely none in vowels.  That's not necessarily to say firmly
>that vowel differences don't exist, but I didn't hear them, and I
>heard the consonant differences clearly.
>
>I started to wonder if this is a fundamental difference between 
>Spanish and English: in Spanish, different dialects use different
>consonant sounds, and in English, different dialects use different 
>vowels (or more accurately, different dipthongs and triphongs).

[No more accurately.  Plenty of interdialectal contrasts are in the
monophthongs, like [%] vs. [A] and [I] vs. [E].]

	It's a general tendancy, not an absolute rule.  Have you ever
had a chance to hear anyone speak "asturianu"?  Or West Country
English?  Furthermore, the contrast between Castilian and its Romance
neighbors (Galico-Portuguese, Aragonese, and Catalan) is as much in
the vowels as the consonants; the same can be said of the contrast
between English and Scottish.

-- 
	 Daniel "Da" von Brighoff    /\          Dilettanten
	(deb5@midway.uchicago.edu)  /__\         erhebt Euch
				   /____\      gegen die Kunst!
