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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Aug 2005
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Wikipedia ( cuidado!) covers ceceo in Spanish ( link) and English ( link). And a linguist describes the phenomenon in Spanish ( link) at an Austrian academic site. The reason I personally doubt it, as pointed out by twosleepy (welcome) in this thread, is that if the putative (unnamed) king actually lisped, he wouldn't have just lisped sibilants represented by c and z in Spanish orthography, but also those in s. ( Sarà vero ma non ci credo.) Also, note that not all continental Spanish dialects exhibit ceceo, not even in Andalusia.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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Good point about the partial lisp. We visited the church of Santa Thethelia. I think the vosotros/tu may be a city thing as well. In more rural areas of both regions the older and more formal customs may tend to hang on longer.
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old hand
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I have never visited Spain, although I would like to, so I have no actual experience hearing the ceceo in action, other than a Spaniard away from the homeland... The tu/vosotros thing is fairly well established in most areas. Vosotros is not commonly used because the speaker's audience must consist entirely of persons with whom the speaker is on a familiar basis, and that is rare, outside of a group of friends. The ustedes form addresses everyone respectfully, and therefore is "safer" to use, without risk of offense. Vosotros is used with greater frequency in Spain, and therefore is taught in Spanish courses, but generally only introduced and shown, and not required/tested. "Lisping king" controversy fuel: http://spanish.about.com/cs/qa/a/q_lisp.htm
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old hand
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Woo hoo! I'm not a "stranger" anymore (hated that...) :0)
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enthusiast
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enthusiast
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2. "Accent" is mostly unimportant in communication,... A poor one can hinder native listeners from focusing on the message.
Which is it? Certainly in Hindi, the latter is definitely true, to the extent that actors and actresses who grew up in Hindi-speaking households outside India have been dubbed over in their films not because they couldn't speak the language, but because their accent was too distracting. Hardly "unimportant in communication."
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old hand
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What I was trying to say is that if a person speaks a language correctly, but has a poor accent, communication still occurs. It doesn't bother me that much when I hear heavily accented English, but I know for others it can be a problem. "Distracting" is not the same as "preventing". The poor accent is mostly annoying, and most of us would rather not be annoyed. But bottom line, if it's understandable, then communication happens, and that's what is important. :0)
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old hand
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On the other hand, in tonal languages, without the right accent it must be almost impossible to communicate.
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enthusiast
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enthusiast
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What I was trying to say is that if a person speaks a language correctly, but has a poor accent, communication still occurs. It doesn't bother me that much when I hear heavily accented English, but I know for others it can be a problem. "Distracting" is not the same as "preventing". The poor accent is mostly annoying, and most of us would rather not be annoyed. But bottom line, if it's understandable, then communication happens, and that's what is important. :0) The contradiction remains. You claimed that accent is unimportant in communication. This is clearly bunkum. Accent is very important in communication in many situations. I've seen Welsh and Scottish programs on TV in which the dialog was in English but English subtitles were provided. I've also watched a film in which it was easier for me to follow the actors when they were speaking Punjabi, a language I know little of, than when they were speaking English, my native language, because their Glaswegian accents made the English almost impenetrable. All of this invalidates your assertion that accent is "unimportant in communication".
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addict
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OP
addict
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twosleepy says X. latishya has thought of exceptions to X.
Is X invalidated?
It's simply qualified. In its implied form (the qualification should have been obvious): Accent is unimportant in communication under a sufficient variety of circumstances to justify the rule, but with other obvious exceptions.
Similarly, the size of one's mouth is not important to oral communication, unless one's mouth is the size of a peanut.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Dec 2000
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On the other hand, in tonal languages, without the right accent it must be almost impossible to communicate. I've heard of the existence of a Chinese language that has the same sounds as Mandarin but with different tones and that for a native Mandarin speaker it is totally incomprehnsible, but for someone who has learned Mandarin from a non-tonal language, in this case English, it was as comprehensible as Mandarin was.
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