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The Spanish sibilant shift was a phonetic shift in the Castillian language which took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and gave rise in part to the modern Spanish pronunciation system.
Phonetic description
[edit]Among the phonemes of Old Spanish, spoken approximately until the beginning of the fifteenth century, there were six distinct sibilants, consisting of three pairs of voiced and unvoiced consonants:
- Two dental affricates: /ʦ/ y /ʣ/, (pronounced like the Italian z in pizza and the ds in adds), represented by the symbols ç (c before e/i) and z.
- Two alveolar fricatives: /s/ and /z/, represented in the syllable-initial and word-final positions by s or by ss between vowels, and by s between vowels, respectively.
- Two postalveolar fricatives: /š/ and /ž/, (like the English sh and the French or Catalan j), represented by x, and j (g before e/i), respectively.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a shift in the pronunciation of these phonemes took place which can be summarized in three stages:
- The voiced/voiceless opposition was lost as the pronunciations of the voiced consonants merged with those of the unvoiced consonants, reducing the number of phonemes from six to three: /ʦ/, /s/, and /š/.
References
[edit][[Category:Spanish language]]