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Travis G. Bradley and Ann Marie Delforge
73-88 (complete pdf)
Judeo-Spanish (JS) denotes those Spanish varieties preserved by the Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Spain in 1492. JS phonology retains many of the features of pre-Expulsion Spanish, such as the presence of voiced sibilants in word-medial and word-final intervocalic contexts. The present study, based on a phonetic corpus of modern Istanbul JS, shows that the distinction between voiced and voiceless sibilants is maintained word-medially, but that voicing in word-final intervocalic position is more variable than has been indicated in previous descriptions of JS. The difference observed between the realizations of sibilant voicing in word-medial and external sandhi contexts is interpreted as supporting a phonetic underspecification approach to obstruent voicing neutralization (Ernestus 2003, Steriade 1997). Among the phonological innovations claimed to exist in modern JS is loss of the tap-trill contrast. The present study of Istanbul JS documents a voiced approximant of variable duration in syllable-initial contexts, although this does not necessarily entail the neutralization of rhotic contrast. Frication and devoicing of word-final rhotics is observed in prepausal contexts, most likely due to phonological transfer from Turkish.
Published in:
Selected Proceedings of the 8th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium
edited by Timothy L. Face and Carol A. Klee
Table of contents
ISBN 978-1-57473-408-9 library binding
vi + 220 pages
publication date: 2006
published by Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA, USA