• Lvxferre@mander.xyzM
    2·
    9 days ago

    Hey, I ain’t dissin’ Chilean varieties!

    …plus my native language (Portuguese) is a lot like “Spã’ish but you’re too lazy to prõ’ounce a few softer cõsonants, so you simp’y skip them.”, accordingly to some folks.

    • apolo399@lemmy.world
      2·
      9 days ago

      There’s this book I really enjoy, “From Latin to Spanish” by Paul Lloyd, that goes at length on the phonological and syntactical evolution of spanish and, damn, spanish really did take quite the funky path in the evolution of its phoneme system while portuguese remained conservative in plenty of its inventory. It’s really fun to compare them and see where they diverged and how some phenomena are really quite distinctly romance, like palatalization due to a yod.

      • Lvxferre@mander.xyzM
        1·
        9 days ago

        Portuguese is more conservative on analysis; like, the phonemic inventory doesn’t change that much from Continental Proto-Romance. But once you look at the surface, you find a bunch of weird stuff, like:

        • a general tendency to convert /Cl/ clusters into /Cɾ/; see praia/playa, cravo/clavo, or dialectally *prástico (standard: “plástico”). You typically don’t see this much in Spanish, except in the Caribbean. It’s nowadays stigmatised but still an ongoing process in some dialects (like Caipira).
        • even conservative Portuguese dialects have a tendency to shift to stress timing on quick speech, with vowel reduction and/or elision. On the other hand Spanish typically keeps itself syllable timed, even on quick speech.
        • most intervocalic /l/ and /n/ are gone, except in reborrowings. Some /n/'s got regenerated as /ɲ/, but that’s from a nasal vowel splitting again into oral vowel + nasal consonant. See e.g. cor/color, coroa/corona, boa/buena.
        • the nasal vowels are becoming phonemic, Lombard/French style; in some situations you can’t simply analyse, say, [ẽ] or [ə̃] as /eN/ and /aN/ any more.
        • rhotics. Unlike Spanish, Portuguese never backed /ʃ/ into [x], so there was that “gap” in the phonology that got filled by /r/ instead: [r]→[ʀ ʁ ɦ x χ h], with all intermediate links popping up in some dialect. In the meantime /ɾ/ became [ɾ ɹ ɻ], with [ɻ] trying to split into a third phoneme.

        There’s also a bunch of phenomena that appear in both, but got stigmatised in Portuguese and accepted in Spanish. A good example of that is yeísmo - it does pop up in Portuguese but it’s associated with rural people, and seen as “poor speech”.

        Sorry for the wall of text.

        • apolo399@lemmy.world
          1·
          9 days ago

          No, thank you for the wall of text! I enjoy this type of discussion and even more so on spanish and portuguese.

          I really find interesting the connection you make with the Caribbean dialects. There has been a great influx of venezuelans and cubans in the south of Brazil and I’m astonished by the similarities that they share with portuguese, sometimes in the choice of vocabulary, some other times in grammatical constructions, and I’ve already heard a cuban or two pronounce /r/ as is done in portuguese.