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
editAmong 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]]