# Articulation of /s/ and /z/ in (Old) Spanish



## miguel89

Having read a few books on Spanish historical grammar, I have noticed that they take for granted Old Spanish /s/ and /z/ (both from Latin /s/) were apico-alveolar, the laminal articulation (general in Spain in the 16th century, from then on only in America, Andalusia and Canaries, after laminal /s/ > /θ/) being a later development. Considering that in French and Italian (and probably in other Romance languages) these consonants are laminal, why is this assumption being made?


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## CapnPrep

Well, Latin /s/ was apparently realized as apico-alveolar, and modern Spanish (north and central peninsular) /s/ is _still_ apico-alveolar, so what evidence would there be to say that Old Spanish /s/ was laminal? 

I think the assumption is that the articulation of this phoneme stayed more or less constant (except for voicing to [z] and devoicing back to ), while the adjacent sounds underwent all kinds of changes (i.e., dz/ts > denti-alveolar s > θ, dʒ/tʃ > ʃ > x).


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## Forero

What evidence do we have that Latin /s/ was apico-alveolar? Is that the same as retroflex?


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## CapnPrep

Forero said:


> Is that the same as retroflex?


No, it's alveolar, but apical /s/ is sometimes described as "retracted" with respect to laminal /s/, and the sound that it makes is a bit closer to /ʃ/. And in fact there seems to be a tendency for languages without /ʃ/ to have an apical /s/, since it's more "economical" (this would be the case of Latin, as well as modern Castillian), whereas languages with both /ʃ/ and /s/ will tend to use a more distinctive laminal /s/ (e.g. English). Modern French and standard Italian also have a laminal /s/, as miguel89 noted, but these languages (along with Portuguese) had an apical /s/ in the medieval period.

The major references here are Jungemann (1952) and Martinet (1955). Also, the following papers can be found on JSTOR:
Martin Joos (1952) *"*The Medieval Sibilants." _Language _28:222-231
Douglas Q. Adams (1975) "The Distribution of Retracted Sibilants in Medieval Europe." _Language_ 51:282-292


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## berndf

CapnPrep said:


> And in fact there seems to be a tendency for languages without /ʃ/ to have an apical /s/


Like e.g. Greek.



CapnPrep said:


> whereas languages with both /ʃ/ and /s/ will tend to use a more distinctive laminal /s/


Wouldn't it then be more plausible to assume Spanish "re-invented" the apico-alveolar /s/ after the loss of "x"=/ʃ/? If not, how would you explain the dorsal pronunciation in South-American Spanish?


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## CapnPrep

berndf said:


> Wouldn't it then be more plausible to assume Spanish "re-invented" the apico-alveolar /s/ after the loss of "x"=/ʃ/? If not, how would you explain the dorsal pronunciation in South-American Spanish?


But why would it have "lost" apical /s/ before that? On the other hand, the presence of apical /s/ could explain why /ʃ/ got "pushed back" to /x/.

It is true that varieties of Spanish with laminal /s/ are an exception to Martinet's principle of "phonetic economy". But this should be seen as a kind of ideal tendency, which can be overridden by other factors (in this case, the pressure to merge with the dental /s/ resulting from the deaffrication of ts/dz).


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## berndf

CapnPrep said:


> But why would it have "lost" apical /s/ before that?


Because 16th century Spanish had a phonemic /ʃ/ which didn't exist in Latin. For the same reason French and Italian presumably changed to a dorsal /s/.


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## Forero

I have heard that most of the people that came to America from Spain were from the south, which had recently been under Arab rule. Arabic and Mozarabic had /ʃ/, but it seems northern Spanish had apico-alveolar /s/.

And "x" did not evolve to [x] in America. American Spanish has "x" = [ħ]/. Borrowings from native American languages suggest American Spanish originally had "x" = [ʃ].


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## CapnPrep

berndf said:


> Because 16th century Spanish had a phonemic /ʃ/ which didn't exist in Latin.


The "instability" introduced by this phoneme could be resolved either by modifying the articulation of /ʃ/ or the articulation of /s/, or both. (Of course it's a little strange that an "unstable" situation could survive for so many centuries and then suddenly change very quickly.) There are lots of examples of confusion between ‹x› and ‹ss› in this period (we talked about some here), so I don't think it can be argued that apical /s/ became laminal, and then became apical again.



Forero said:


> Arabic and  Mozarabic had /ʃ/, but it seems northern Spanish had apico-alveolar  /s/.


According to Adams (cited above, p. 285), the Mozarabic dialects had both retracted (apical) and non-retracted (laminal/dorsal) /s/, in addition to /ʃ/. But it's true that Castillian words with /s/ more often end up with  /ʃ/ in Mozarabic transcriptions. (Which provides more evidence that Castillian /s/ remained apical the whole time.)


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## berndf

CapnPrep said:


> There are lots of examples of confusion between ‹x› and ‹ss› in this period (we talked about some here)
> ...
> According to Adams (cited above, p. 285), the Mozarabic dialects had both retracted (apical) and non-retracted (laminal/dorsal) /s/, in addition to /ʃ/. But it's true that Castillian words with /s/ more often end up with /ʃ/ in Mozarabic transcriptions. (Which provides more evidence that Castillian /s/ remained apical the whole time.)


So there was some regional diffentiation concerning apical vs. dorsal pronunciation of /s/ in 16th century Spain and both varieties co-existed. In Latin America the one prevailed and in Spain the other. Is that the big picture, then?


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## CapnPrep

I would say "no", but I guess it depends what you mean by "/s/".

Yes, there was an apical sibilant and a dorsal sibilant in Spanish by this time, but they were not two realizations of the same phoneme. They corresponded to two phonemes (one written ‹s›/‹ss›, the other written ‹c›/‹ç›) that the language was now struggling to keep distinct. In north/central Spain, the distinction was preserved (although the voiced versions of these two sibilants disappeared); in other varieties it was lost.


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## berndf

CapnPrep said:


> I would say "no", but I guess it depends what you mean by "/s/".
> ...
> in other varieties it was lost.


That's what I meant. In some varieties of Spanish the phonemes merged. You wrote before





> But it's true that Castillian words with /s/ more often end up with /ʃ/ in Mozarabic transcriptions.


Isn't this a sign, the phonemic distinction wasn't there any more in that dialect?


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## CapnPrep

berndf said:


> Isn't this a sign, the phonemic distinction wasn't there any more in that dialect?


I would say it's a more a sign that the Mozarabic apical /s/ and the Spanish apical /s/ were not exactly the same sound. I don't know much about Mozarabic, but it looks like apical /s/ and /ʃ/ were definitely distinct. I don't know if the two kinds of [s] were on their way to merging before the language was displaced by Spanish (thus possibly contributing to the development of _seseo_ and _ceceo_ in the south).


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## Forero

My understanding is that the "retracted" Mozarabic /s/ was not apical.


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## berndf

CapnPrep said:


> I would say it's a more a sign that the Mozarabic apical /s/ and the Spanish apical /s/ were not exactly the same sound. I don't know much about Mozarabic, but it looks like apical /s/ and /ʃ/ were definitely distinct. I don't know if the two kinds of [s] were on their way to merging before the language was displaced by Spanish (thus possibly contributing to the development of _seseo_ and _ceceo_ in the south).


I still have trouble believing that the dorsal pronunciation of "s" (not of "c" or "z") should be entirely a Latin American innovation. It is not varying with region like e.g. the pronunciation of "j". And in the vast majority of cases when colonial varieties of a language differ from the standard language of the home land, it is the latter which has changed.


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## CapnPrep

berndf said:


> I still have trouble believing that the dorsal pronunciation of "s" (not of "c" or "z") should be entirely a Latin American innovation.


I am having trouble seeing where anyone in this thread (other than you) has suggested such a thing. As miguel89 pointed out in the very first message, laminal /s/ is found today in Andalusia and in the Canaries, as well as in Latin America. And as Forero reminds us, it is no accident that we find many of the same features in Latin American Spanish and in Andalusian speech.



> It is not varying with region like e.g. the pronunciation of "j".



This is also incorrect. Quite a few different realizations can be observed today for the merged ‹s›/‹c› phoneme, in both _seseo_ and _ceceo _varieties, both in Latin America and in Spain. These include "concave apico-alveolar", "convex predorso-dental", "flat coronal dental/denti-alveolar", "apico-interdental, similar to θ", … (These are Lapesa's descriptions, please don't ask me what they all mean exactly, it's just to give an idea of the phonetic variation that exists.)


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## berndf

CapnPrep said:


> I am having trouble seeing where anyone in this thread (other than you) has suggested such a thing. As miguel89 pointed out in the very first message, laminal /s/ is found today in Andalusia and in the Canaries, as well as in Latin America. And as Forero reminds us, it is no accident that we find many of the same features in Latin American Spanish and in Andalusian speech.


You, by contradicting me on #10.


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## merquiades

berndf said:


> I still have trouble believing that the dorsal pronunciation of "s" (not of "c" or "z") should be entirely a Latin American innovation. It is not varying with region like e.g. the pronunciation of "j". And in the vast majority of cases when colonial varieties of a language differ from the standard language of the home land, it is the latter which has changed.



No, it is not a Latin American invention.  It stems directly from changes in Southwestern Andalusia (Córdoba, Sevilla, Cádiz) before 1492. There the s and z merged into s (called seseo).  In Eastern Andalusia it merged the other way into ceceo (both pronounced as th). [Sorry for not having a keyboard with phonetic symbols].  By accident this region had the ports from which all ships set sail to the Canary Islands and Latin America, and large numbers of colonists came from this area or had spent some time there before embarking. (Forero also talked a bit about this I believe)

Old Spanish had 6 silabant sounds  ts and dz, s and z, and sh and zh(j as in French).  In central Spain the voiced consonants were merged into the unvoiced consonants by the 1400's I believe, leaving ts, s, and sh. However, in fact these 3 phonemes came to be pronounced quite close together, too close for comfort.  So the frontal consonant moved forward becoming eventually th, and the back consonant moved further back into kh (x I believe phonetically). This became official in 1700.

In Andalusia a different symplication occurred. dz>z, ts>s,  final s> sh, final z> zh.  This is similar to what happened in Portuguese.  If Mózarabe, Sefardí, or Arabic had any role in this... unfortunately I don't know and haven't studied this aspect.  At any rate, the area eventally came under the direct influence of Castille, and northern devoicing spread into the area bringing about a reduction of those 4 phonemes into only two: s (initial, intervocalic) and sh (initial, intervocalic, final).  Further castilianization (somewhat later)changed all sh to kh (or x symbol if you prefer)-- that's also why Andalusians aspirate final s (loh amigoh)-- and changed all s to th in the ceceo areas. Colonization of Latin America in the 1500's, 1600's came after.

I studied all of this in linguistic class years ago, sorry if I skipped over some detail that is important to you (laminal, apico etc) or some exact date I don't remember or specify, but the general idea is this.

Note:  better give more info

sound ts, old spelling (ç or c) modern (z or ce, ci)  caza
sound dz, old spelling (z) modern (z or ce ci )  decir
sound s, old spelling (ss) modern (s)  paso
sound z, old spelling  (s) modern (s)  casa
sound sh, old spelling  (x) modern (j or ge, gi)  ejercicio
sound zh, old spelling  (j) modern (j or ge, gi)  joya

Modern Spanish orthography (unfortunately) eliminated etymological roots in order to simplify spelling around the 3 Castilian phonemes.  So a word like cabaça became (z) in cabeza because it comes before a, and dezir switched to (c) before e, i.  Likewise double ss (passar) and simple s (casa) all became simple s.  Modern j coming from x (sh) was also merged into j or ge, gi (as words like exercicio, ejercicio suggest), causing the problem of Mexican place names like (México, Oaxaca, even Texas) which should become all J with modern spelling.


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## berndf

Thank you, Merquiades. A very good summary.


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## merquiades

Forero said:


> I thought it was _passo_ with [s] and _casa_ with [z], not _paso_ and _cassa_.



Yes, indeed, Forero!  Thanks for pointing that out. I'll make the change.


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