Originally Posted By: zmjezhd
"Is that bay as in Victor or bay as in Habana?"

And for the curious, the phoneme in boca and vaca is not the same as the b or v in English. It is a voiced bilabial fricative /β/ and neither a voiced labio-dental fricative /v/ or a voiced bilabial stop /b/. (It is the voiced counterpart of the f in Japanese futon, /ɸ/.


Depending on your particular dialect of Spanish. In some it is only the intervocalic B/V that is pronounced as Nunc describes. Initial B/V is pronounced much like our initial B. What makes the "bay as in Victor..." line particularly funny is that the V is pronounced like our B and the B (that's how they spell Havana in Spanish) is pronounced something like our V.