Neat! I probably never would have known that if you hadn't told me!
ArtemisimetrA
joined 10 months ago
And then when you actually spend any time in a place where Spanish is the first language, you start to understand that, like any language, there's the academic form (commonly taught to non-native speakers as a second or third etc. language), and then there's the local version, complete with all the colloquialisms and slang and unique pronunciations. In Argentina, the double-L (which school taught me makes a "y" sound, "ella" being pronounced basically "ey-ya") is commonly pronounced as more of a soft "J" sound ("ella" becomes "ey-jha"). As far as my (admittedly limited) knowledge goes, that's really not common outside of Argentina. And then in Bolivia, especially among native descendants (Quechua and Aymara predominantly), the double-r (which school taught me is one of two conditions when you roll the R with a tongue trill) is more commonly pronounced almost like a "zh" ("herramienta" becomes "hezhamienta"). Again, not common outside of Bolivia. Spain has that classic "Barthelona" lisp, and uses the "vosotros" pronoun where most South American Spanish speakers would probably use "ustedes" (basically "y'all" vs. "esteemed plural second persons"). And that's not even getting into which verb tenses are used most widely in different regions. There's like 14 or 15 specific verb tenses in Spanish to English's 7, and in school I was taught to use specific ones to communicate effectively; then I went and spent two months in Bolivia pretty much never using past perfect or predicate, instead using past imperfect for 95% of interactions, only using past perfect with other folks que hablan español como segunda lengua, or in a few very specific interactions where more detail or specificity was required than would be so in common, everyday interactions. [Edit for spelling]
Oh yeah totally! That's a much better explanation of that specific phoneme. I went for the over-simplified version that was being taught to me in middle school, where I think the assumption was mostly "we need to teach them grammatical and structural rules and not worry about natural sounding pronunciation" which probably contributes strongly to the gringo accent where vowels aren't pronounced consistently, but shift more like they do in English, and creates mispronunciations that are so grating and confusing (especially between certain a, i, & e sounds)