“El inglés de los güesos” (1924; “The Englishman of the Bones”) is a famous novel of manners written by the Argentine novelist and story-writer Benito Lynch. In this tragic story of love between a young English anthropologist and a gaucho girl, Lynch portrays the personality and psychology of his characters by means of two different types of language. As Settgast (1969) asserts, Lynch uses a “very correct and expressive language” when he narrates the story, and a “rural dialect” to depict his characters. Hence, the inclusion of the word güesos instead of huesos in the title of the novel.
Lynch’s Irish ancestry and his experience living on a cattle ranch in Buenos Aires as a boy made a good mix to enable him to perceive quite accurately the pronunciation of rural people. I personally do not think that Lynch was very much consciously aware of the phonetic systems of English and Spanish, but he must have certainly had developed the conceptualization of the sounds belonging into both systems since he was used to interacting with people using them. This might be the reason why he identified the use of the voiced velar fricative /ɣ/ before the /w/ in [ɣwesoh]. This is the topic I will focus upon.
I will share the consonant chart (see fig.1) to clarify certain concepts when I compare Rioplatense Spanish and BBC English.
Fig. 1
English and Spanish share the labial-velar approximant /w/ in their consonant systems, but while English speakers produce a more labialized version of the sound, Spanish speakers pronounce a more velarized version. This often leads Spanish speakers to narrow the opening between articulators and thus produce a voiced velar fricative [ɣ] before the /w/. This can also be explained by the fact that Rioplatense Spanish speakers use the [ɣ] as an allophonic variant of the voiced velar plosive /g/ in intervocalic position e.g. [laɣo] lago (lake) and, sometimes, even in initial position when they are not speaking emphatically, e.g. in the sentence Me gusta [me ɣuhta]
It is possible that for Rioplatense Spanish native speakers who are not informed about English pronunciation, this insertion of the voiced velar fricative [ɣ] could remain unnoticed. This might be the reason why they keep inserting the sound in words such as [ɣwen] when, [ɣwɒt] what, [ɣwɜːd] word, etc.
when they start learning English,
Finch and Ortíz Lira (1982) explain that “Spanish consonants are in general articulated with weaker muscular tension than their English counterparts” and that is the reason why the commonest realizations of Spanish plosives /b, d, g/ are the fricatives [β, ð, ɣ] (p.62). Salcedo (2010) describes these allophonic variations as ‘slit fricatives” (p.200) because they are produced with a kind of lenition, as Professor Wells (2012) explains. He states that the space is a left-to-right gap rather than the front-to-back “groove” that distinguishes other fricatives such as /s/.
In terms of teaching priorities, this insertion could be considered within category 3 for Collins and Mees (2008) or “optional attention” as defined by Kenworthy (1988) since it does not interfere with intelligibility and native speakers would not find it extremely disturbing. It just brings about a gross foreign accent. If learners’ aim is to develop communication skills, an International English or even an English as Lingua Franca pronunciation will do. Nevertheless, if they want to be as accurate as they can, we could help them to get rid of this feature by encouraging them to create nonsense sentences formed by words spelt with “w”. When they think of the words, they associate the spelling with their accurate pronunciation; while they listen to their peers reading, they become better aware of the difference in their production; and when they read to be heard and assessed by their peers, they will focus attention on avoiding the insertion of the [ɣ]
You might have noticed the /h/ at the end of [ɣwesoh]. That will be the topic of my next post.
REFERENCES:
COLLINS, V. and I.MEES. 2008. Practical Phonetics and Phonology. A resource book for students. 2nd ed. Oxon:Routledge.
FINCH, D. and H.ORTIZ LIRA, 1982. A Course in English Phonetics for Spanish Speakers. London: Heinemann.
KENWORTHY, J. 1988. Teaching English Pronunciation. Harlow:Longman.
SALCEDO, C. (2010) “The Phonological System of Spanish.” in Revista de Lingüística y Lenguas Aplicadas (pp.195-209)
WELLS, J. John(2012) Wells’s phonetic blog at http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.com.ar/search?q=slit+fricatives [accessed 2018_05_12]
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