1. One of the most difficult phonetic problems encountered by a speaker of Spanish who is studying English is how t o learn t o hear the distinction between and produce the English phonemes /&/ and / 6 / . Apart from the purely phonetic aspect the matter is further complicated by the fact that English has an abundance of /g/ and / E / minimal pairs which can cause extremely humorous-or embarrassing-situations when confused.(For example, "While shaving, John cut his shin . " The reader can think of many more.) Difficulty in hearing and producing these two English phonemes is very common among speakers of Spanish for two principal reasons. First, in no dialect of modern Spanish, to this writer's knowledge, does [ g ] exist as a phoneme, and in many dialects it does not even exist a s a phone. This can be seen in foreign words containing [ 51 which a r e Hispanicized. For example, French champagne [ 5ip5p] becomes champaza [ Eamp$a] , or English shaw.? [gal] becomes cha.? [Eal]. Secondly, it is likely that in some Latin-American countries [ g] is being used today in free variation or possibly complementary distribution with [ E l . For example, in Panama Zeche can be heard as either [ l G e ] or [16?ie]. This latter hypothesis is suggested by the fact that, while most Spanish-Americans claim that [ 61 is not "correct" in their dialect, they admit that it causes no difficulty in meaning when heard in place of [El. And, when tested, many of them show a complete inability to distinguish between these two sounds i n Spanish words a s well as English words. In addition t o this, it seems reasonable to assume that the affricate [ c] may someday pass entirely over to the fricative [ g] , thereby suffering the same fate a s the two medieval Spanish affricates [ ts] and [ dz] , which evolved into the modern fricatives [ Q ] in northern and central Spain and [ s] in southern Spain. In most dialects of modern Spanish [ is a voiceless palatal affricate.l The English [ E ] is articulated i n almost the 67
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