Something linguistic I learned today
One of the things I found most challenging about multisyllabic words in English is that you don’t really pronounce most of the vowels except for the vowel in the stressed syllable; the rest are just unstressed central vocoids or schwas.
By contrast, in Spanish, we distinctively articulate each vowel regardless of its stress status … or so I thought. Martinez Celdrán and Fernárndez Planas (2007:88) report that “all vowels are somewhat centralized when unstressed, with respect to the more peripheral position in the vowel space they occupy when stressed” … sounds very schwa-y to me …
Does that mean that in 200 years we would be like English? 😱😱😱
Erwin Lares
Dissertator with the Department of Spanish and Portuguese &
Project Assistant with the Office of Research Cyberinfrastructure
I’m an aikidoist, dog dad & a humanist. I started my PhD in linguistics in my forties. I speak Spanish natively and English as an L2 speaker. I love to travel, but I’m not too crazy about traaaaveling.