[YG Conlang Archives] > [ceqli group] > messages [Date Index] [Thread Index] >
> And your advocacy of the glottal stop is all the more admirable inasmuch as > I seem to remember that the glottal stop is extremely rare or even > nonexistent in Spanish. You're right. In Spanish it appears only at the begining of a sentence if this happens to begin with a vowel-initial word (e.g. when saying just "Hola" [?o.la]). Anywhere else, the first syllable of vowel-initial words is merged with the preceding syllable, even creating 'weird' diphthongs if necessary, e.g. "Le dije hola" sounds as [le.di.Xeo.la], with an [eo] diphthong; "permaneció de pie y aun sonriendo" sounds as [per.ma.ne.Tio.De.pieiaun.son.ri.en.do] with an amazing [ieiau] 'pentaphthong' (but the vowels i and e of 'sonriendo' are separated by hiatus because the first belongs to the root "re-/ri-" of verb "reír" and the second to the gerund suffix "-(i)endo" and as an exception you can't glide them). That tendency to glide adjacent vowels is the "sinalefa" phenomenon I talked about in other post, which I suppose must be quite difficult to master for foreigners (especially for Germans, as they have the opposite tendency of separating adjacent vowels by means of a glottal stop). Best regards, Javier