Re: Cómo se dice ther[o]pod y synapsid e

[David Marjanovic <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>]

>  It also makes sense if you know a little bit of the history of
>  Spanish:
>
>  1) <j> starts off in Latin as representing the sound [j] as in "yam"
>  (actually, <j> starts off as a fancy way of writing <i>, which
>  remained the case through the late Middle Ages);
>
>  2) In early Romance, [j] shifts to [d3] as in "judge" in most
>  positions;

This is now gradually happening _again_ in some kinds of Spanish (where 
the shifting [j] is written <y> and <ll>). I know a Chilean who uses the 
entire spectrum depending on... I don't know what actually.

>  3) In something like the common ancestor of Spanish and Portuguese,
>  [d3] weakens to [3] as in "trea_s_ure";

Has famously happened to <y> and <ll> in Argentina.

>  4) In late medieval Spanish, [3] merges with [S] as in "shiny";

[3] was written <j> and "soft" <g>, [S] was written <x> as in <Don 
Quixote>. This gives you <Jiménez>, <Giménez> and <Ximénez> (no idea 
which, if any, of these is etymologically correct).

>  6) In some contemporary Spanish dialects, [x] shifts to [h] as in
>  "happy".

This has happened in Colombia and parts of Mexico, AFAIK.

>  (for example, the "t" sounds in "top", "stop", "bit", "bitter", and
>  "bitten" are phonetically quite distinct in General American English,
>  but their distribution is predictable based on stress and the
>  surrounding sounds, to the extent that native speakers have trouble
>  hearing the difference, so we say they are all variants of a single
>  phoneme /t/).

To elaborate on this: in <top> it's aspirated (there's sort of a [h] in 
it), aspiration being something I had to be taught in school because it 
doesn't exist in southern German; in <stop> it's not aspirated 
(...something I was never taught; I had to read about it a few years ago 
on teh intarwebz...), because the [s] has already let the air pressure 
out, and surprisingly many (most?) people go a step further and turn it 
into a voiceless [d], the same thing as the Spanish <t>; in <bit> it's 
unaspirated, to various extents glottalized (see below) in order to 
actively take the aspiration away, and for Americans it's usually 
unreleased (that is, the tongue is moved into that position, but it's 
never audibly moved out), so it takes some practice to even notice its 
existence if you haven't grown up with it; in <bitter> it's a _voiced_ 
sound, a so-called flap, for Americans; and in <bitten> it's 
unaspirated, has a nasal release, and is seriously glottalized for most 
people (that is, you hold your breath while saying it), so that it turns 
entirely into a glottal stop for some Americans (and most Britons), and 
that's something I first had to learn to recognize as a consonant, 
because where I come from it's a pause. Oh, and, the strength of 
aspiration also depends on how stressed a syllable is.

For comparison, in southern Standard German and many southern dialects 
such as mine, <t> is unaspirated [t] like in French, except that it 
turns into voiceless [d] (thus merging with <d>) under many 
circumstances at the ends of words.