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Why no elisions in Spanish?

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tractor
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 Message 9 of 17
23 June 2010 at 11:09pm | IP Logged 
Andy E wrote:
(my comment on "s"+ "r" remains ,however, since I'm not sure it relates to "extreme" dialects but
merely the difficulty of hitting the trill after an "s" which seems to affect some people and not others - the Assimil
example I was thinking of is on the lines of ...es real... or something like that)


The missing s before r is also common in Standard Peninsular Spanish and northern dialects where the s-es are not
normally dropped or aspirated.
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Andy E
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 Message 10 of 17
23 June 2010 at 11:22pm | IP Logged 
tractor wrote:
The missing s before r is also common in Standard Peninsular Spanish and northern dialects where the s-es are not
normally dropped or aspirated.


Yes - I've heard it on national (rather than local) Spanish TV and, of course, Assimil Spanish is Standard Peninsular Spanish.


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YoshiYoshi
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 Message 11 of 17
24 June 2010 at 4:57am | IP Logged 
Cainntear wrote:
The example about.com gives is "la artista". If you call that elision, which A has been dropped? Is it "la 'rtista" or "l' artista"? If it's impossible to say which sound has been lost, it's probably safer to say that the two sounds have merged.

Excuse me, I'm afraid that, I haven't fully grasped the point why "la artista" cannot be elided as "l'artista" (no doubt "la'rtista" is absolutely incorrect). Does the stress of "l'artista" sound different from that of "la artista" ?
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johntm93
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 Message 12 of 17
24 June 2010 at 6:41am | IP Logged 
YoshiYoshi wrote:
Cainntear wrote:
The example about.com gives is "la artista". If you call that elision, which A has been dropped? Is it "la 'rtista" or "l' artista"? If it's impossible to say which sound has been lost, it's probably safer to say that the two sounds have merged.

Excuse me, I'm afraid that, I haven't fully grasped the point why "la artista" cannot be elided as "l'artista" (no doubt "la'rtista" is absolutely incorrect). Does the stress of "l'artista" sound different from that of "la artista" ?
It's more of a long "a" sound, they hold it a little longer, but I don't think you could really call it "getting rid of" a letter.

Edited by johntm93 on 24 June 2010 at 7:58pm

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s_allard
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 Message 13 of 17
24 June 2010 at 7:23pm | IP Logged 
I'm not an expert on the history of Spanish orthography, so I may be out to lunch on this. But to my perception the orthography of Spanish reflects the phonetic word-initial marking that bares no resemblance to the kind of blending that occurs in French. The Spanish sequences"la artista" or "se está" are not comparable to the French "l'artiste" or "s'est" where the blending is total.

Of course, it should be pointed out that it is for this very reason of awkward phonetic sequences that we have rules that provide for "el agua" and "el alma", "uno u otro" and "rico e inteligente"

In French, the situation is quite different because the words do totally blend together and we'll have forms like "l'eau" and "l'âme".

Interestingly enough, French has something similar to Spanish in that adjectives ending in -eau will change to -el before masculine nouns starting with a vowel to avoid an awkward phonetic sequence. For example, "un bel homme", "un nouvel ami" and "un bel habit".

As an aside that is probably unrelated to the preceding topic, it should be pointed out that French also exhibits the phenomenon of liaison whereby there is a mandatory or optional blending of the final consonant of a word with the initial vowel of the following word. For example, "les enfants" will be pronounced as "les-z-enfants" and "pas encore" becomes "pas-z-encore". It is quite a complex system with some very arcane rules that wreak havoc on foreigners reading French out aloud. One of my favourites examples is "quand il est arrivé" that is pronounced "quand-t-il est-t-arrivé.



Edited by s_allard on 24 June 2010 at 7:23pm

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Cainntear
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 Message 14 of 17
24 June 2010 at 8:43pm | IP Logged 
YoshiYoshi wrote:
Cainntear wrote:
The example about.com gives is "la artista". If you call that elision, which A has been dropped? Is it "la 'rtista" or "l' artista"? If it's impossible to say which sound has been lost, it's probably safer to say that the two sounds have merged.

Excuse me, I'm afraid that, I haven't fully grasped the point why "la artista" cannot be elided as "l'artista" (no doubt "la'rtista" is absolutely incorrect). Does the stress of "l'artista" sound different from that of "la artista" ?

Because...

Even if the sound does reduce down to a single A (and as you've seen, it appears that this is not the case)...

In French, how do we know that "lartiste" is "l'artiste" and not "la'rtiste"?
Because in elisions with other vowels we can see categorically that it is the A at the end of the first word is gone. "l'ordure" "l'indienne" etc.

There is no such evidence within Spanish that would tell you which A is lost.
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Andy E
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 Message 15 of 17
25 June 2010 at 8:36am | IP Logged 
YoshiYoshi wrote:
Excuse me, I'm afraid that, I haven't fully grasped the point why "la artista" cannot be elided as "l'artista" (no doubt "la'rtista" is absolutely incorrect). Does the stress of "l'artista" sound different from that of "la artista" ?


Your original post related to orthography, so even if we found some pocket of Spanish speakers that did, it wouldn't be written that way - in contrast with French.

..and regarding the long "a" sound, if we take a phrase like va a hacer, I'm not convinced that one of those "a"s wouldn't be elided.

Edited by Andy E on 25 June 2010 at 8:36am

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luhmann
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 Message 16 of 17
25 June 2010 at 2:04pm | IP Logged 
Andy E wrote:
..and regarding the long "a" sound, if we take a phrase like va a hacer, I'm not convinced that one of those "a"s wouldn't be elided.


This would not happen in a standard educated speech. If you drop one of the "a"s it becomes "va a ser", or "va hacer". But, of course, in informal speech, you will hear everything.


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