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Pronunciation of ’v’ in Spanish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| rafi94 Diglot Newbie Poland Joined 4150 days ago 6 posts - 7 votes Speaks: Polish*, English | Message 1 of 8 14 January 2013 at 3:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Hey!
I started learning Spanish with assimil course. I have done 4 lessons so far and I'm little confused about how to say 'v' in Spanish. I know for some words it sounds like 'b' (e.g. 'voy' sounds pretty much like English 'boy') but in fourth lesson I had a word 'vaso'. On assimil's CD 'v' sounds there like in English word 'van' but when I checked it on the internet it sounds like 'b' (http://www.merriam-webster.com/spanish/vaso , http://pl.pons.eu/hiszpanski-angielski/vaso or google translate). How should i say that? Which form is more popular? Is there any general rule of saying 'v' in Spanish? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ogrim Heptaglot Senior Member France Joined 4449 days ago 991 posts - 1896 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, French, Romansh, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Catalan, Latin, Greek, Romanian | Message 2 of 8 14 January 2013 at 3:45pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The general normative rule, as far as Spanish spoken in Spain is concerned is the following:
V and B represents exactly the same phoneme, /b/. However, its phonetical representation (i.e. how it actually sounds) depends on the context it is in. At the beginning of a sentence or following a consonant it is pronounced as a plosive, i.e. as an unaspirated b, like you will find in Italian or French. (Note that the B-sound in English is aspirated, it means that it comes with a short breath after, like a weak h-sound.) However, when the Spanish written B or V comes between vowels, it is pronounced as a fricative, which means that you do not close your lips completely, but let air pass through a small opening. In the international phonetic alphabet IPA this is written /β/. Please note that this way of pronouning B and V occurs not only within a word, like in "lavar", but also at the beginning of a word if the preceding word ends in vowel, "la vida". I suggest you listen carefully to how B/V is pronounced depending on the sounds surrounding it. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| michaelyus Diglot Groupie United Kingdom Joined 4375 days ago 53 posts - 87 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English* Studies: Italian, French, Cantonese, Korean, Catalan, Vietnamese, Lingala, Spanish Studies: Hokkien | Message 3 of 8 14 January 2013 at 4:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The /b/ phoneme is not aspirated in (any accent of) English (as far as I am aware); in fact, its difference from the Spanish /b/ is that the English /b/ is somewhat devoiced to [b̥ ~ p], whilst in Spanish it is very fully voiced. But both are unaspirated.
An aspirated /b/, i.e. [bʱ] is famously found in most of the Indo-Aryan languages, although there is debate as to whether this murmured voiced consonant is actually aspirated. It is mentioned that Kelabit, spoken in Borneo, has "a typologically rare series of true voiced aspirates". Edited by michaelyus on 14 January 2013 at 4:51pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ogrim Heptaglot Senior Member France Joined 4449 days ago 991 posts - 1896 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, French, Romansh, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Catalan, Latin, Greek, Romanian | Message 4 of 8 14 January 2013 at 5:05pm | IP Logged | |||||
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michaelyus, you are right, and I was too quick. The fact is that the voiceless plosives are aspirated in English (like p, and k), but the voiced plosives (like b and g) are not. I think it is also correct that the English /b/ is somewhat devoiced compared to Spanish. In fact, I have noticed that for Spanish people sometimes the English /b/ to them sounds like a /p/.
Not to get too much of topic, but could it be that for English the distinction between aspirated and non-aspirated plosive is just as important as voiced vs. voicelss plosive? (By the way, in Norwegian we pronounce them pretty much like they are in English.) Edited by Ogrim on 14 January 2013 at 5:06pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4582 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 5 of 8 15 January 2013 at 6:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Richard Burton Newbie Spain Joined 4142 days ago 34 posts - 64 votes Speaks: Ancient Greek* | Message 6 of 8 15 January 2013 at 6:31pm | IP Logged | |||||
What happens in Germanic languages in general is that the opposition is more by lenis/fortis than voiceless/voiced, but that is more of a -minor- problem and in the other direction, it is rather immaterial when coming from English. Let me critizice also your info above about it being fricative, IT IS NOT, it is APROXIMANT. You are not to blame, you are just relaying this amazing piece of disinfo with a long tradition also in Spanish phonetic literature. The ultimate phonetic explanation is that, while in a fricative sound there is TURBULANCE, in an approximant, there is NOT. At least a phonologist with a name in academia told me so. They are different, although not terribly so. OP, let me give you my version of things. You have encountered in my opinion, and this is not stated anywhere, the greatest, maybe the only, real pronunciation problem in Spanish, that only a small fraction of lerners ever get right, and, contrary to popular perception that the trill is the main source of accent, THIS is the main source of accent. It is VERY CHARACTERISTIC and hits Spanish ears very hard when substituted by plosives, even when they are not phonemes but allophones, in complementary distribution, which means that in certain contexts you use ones, and in others the other, as explained above; natives are unaware of it, but doing everything plosive sounds strongly foreign to them instantly, and compromises fluency in Spanish in my opinion, delivery becomes awkward. So you dont have a problem, but 3; Spaniards often remember the mnemonics "petaca" - "bodega"; memorize this word, "bodega", to remember your 3 little problems Get into your head that in the phrase "la bodega", you 've got three soft pleasing sounds b d g that are rare in world languages; without "la", b becomes plosive because starts phrase as already explained A phrase such as "Me he pillado el dedo en la puerta" pronounced with plosives ds and some retroflex r is amusing per se to Spanish ears. Few people will be able to refrain a chuckle. The effect is exacerbated by the point of articulation (where the tip of the tongue makes contact) being even more backwards in English, really far from where it should be: between the teeth. Normally allophones can be dismissed, but in my opinion in Spanish one better not, because being such a simple system, you can hardly say 4 words in a row without them coming up, and when absent, oral delivery suffers, as opposed to some low frequency allophone in a complex system. And so: problem is I know of no trick or easy description to teach people to produce approximants. It is very frustrating because friends have asked my help and I have been at a loss. Really what happens is just the organs get close, in the case of b the lips, but dont get to fully close and somehow the air is not given any force. Maybe you could try to stick a thin stick in the lips to develop a feeling of the little hole that must remain in the lips. Unlike v in most other languages, teeth have nothing to do, that would be a labiodental, teeth onto lower lip For the aproximant d actually the tip of the tongue comes out more than in English, really between the teeth, whereas in English it is really just behind the upper teeth. This subtlety few people know, when I discovered, my fluency in English improved instantly, and became more comfortable in my mouth, because there is an internal logic in systems, and again, softness instead of friction. They are very gentle sounds and the music of the Spanish language heavily depends on them. The alternation of harsh j and the two phonological rhotics, r, another rarity only as far as I know shared by Armenian, with this 3 soft sounds gives you an alternation of harsh bits with gentle bits of spoken language which in my opinion is responsible for the texture of the language when spoken; since it is such a minimalist sound inventory, it is particulary a pity to superimpose on it features of straneous sound systems The verse : "El ala aleve del leve abanico" , don´t remember by whom, Rubén Darío or someone, conveys analogically the idea of the soft movement of a fan, which moves with NO FRICTION; the way many foreigners pronounce it, would suggest knocking on a door, while with the non-existent fricatives suggest menacing wind :) Sorry :) To recap: I resist the idea of keeping students uninformed of this problem, since starting with good articulatory habits is so powerful for later performance. As polyglot Luca says: "instead of talking of accent reduction, let's talk of accent building"; that is scientifically VERY sound, Luca is an intuitive phonologist. In view that the situation is difficult, a tentative solution using a fricative /v/ and leaving it for later stage of study the 3 of them, but being aware that there is a problem, can be tried. I heard once a speaker as a second language, and he used /v/, e.g. v just as in English, but because all other aspects of the language were very good, it was unimportant. It sounded in my ears as if he was trying to emphasize words written with an "v", peculiar but unimportant. Another example you have it with Greek: Spaniards carry on their aproximants to make the job of the Greek fricatives, and viceversa, and in spite of that, both have naturally good pronunciation of each other's languages. Only: enough to give you away as a foreigner, there is no unimportant features for someone aiming to native-like oral production. So it all depends on yout level of ambition. I know a beginner would tend to complain: OK, if there are two sounds, why not to use one letter (grapheme) for one and the other for the other? answer, because then many words would have two or even more spellings, changing according to context; this is naturally unfeasible So as already noted above, in Spanish b=v AND BOTH have two variations when pronounced. Edited by Richard Burton on 16 January 2013 at 4:26pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| LaughingChimp Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4509 days ago 346 posts - 594 votes Speaks: Czech* | Message 7 of 8 16 January 2013 at 12:15am | IP Logged | |||||
Not phonemic != not important. Studies with altered recordings show that native speakers use all the clues available. So while you may be understood, you probably have a much higher chance of being misheard. Also, the perception of phonemes is an illusion caused by literacy - studies show that illiterate people lack the concept of phoneme. http://www.haskins.yale.edu/sr/SR119/SR119_04.pdf http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1161&c ontext=psychology http://www.hamline.edu/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=214751 4466 http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/121/6/1053.short Edited by LaughingChimp on 16 January 2013 at 12:28am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4582 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 8 of 8 16 January 2013 at 5:34am | IP Logged | |||||
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