The Sounds of Spanish: Analysis and Application (review)

This comprehensive introductory textbook on Spanish phonetics and phonology also features a contrastive analysis of the phonology of American English (and mentions other points of contrast with Basque, Brazilian Portuguese, etc.). It covers well known material (cf. Robert L. Politzer and Charles N. Staubach, Teaching Spanish: A linguistic orientation, New York: Blaisdell, 1961; John B. Dalbor, Spanish pronunciation: Theory and practice, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969, 2nd edn, 1980) and, on the whole, can be recommended for its explanatory adequacy. Strangely enough, the first of the aforementioned volumes is not in the author’s extensive bibliography (408–23). While many terms and concepts are well-defined and illustrated by the author, others remain problematic. Let me mention but a few.

Ch. 1, on the study of sounds and sound systems, uses the first edition of Peter Ladefoged’s A course in phonetics (New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1975), whereas the fourth edition was published in 2001, and the third in 1993. In Ch. 2, on phonetic transcription, one reads that ‘Spanish is not a phonetic language’ (12). Of course, as is well known, all spoken languages are phonetic, that is they have phonemes, which in turn have phones. The author is making reference to the phoneme-grapheme correspondence, an entirely different matter needing no further elaboration here. Ch. 3, on speech production and acoustic phonetics, observes that pharyngeals are ‘articulated in numerous languages’ (20). This is hyperbolic in that they occur in very few of the approximately 7,000 languages spoken today. Ch. 5, on articulatory phonetics, calls [ʔ] a ‘voiceless glottal stop’ (47); ‘glottal stop’ would have sufficed since a voiced glottal stop is impossible. The section on the pharyngeal cavity states that ‘many non-Western languages include different combinations of voiced and voiceless pharyngeal stops and fricatives’ (50), but pharyngeal stops are very rare—so rare, in fact, that the IPA does not even have a symbol for them. In Ch. 7, on the phoneme, a glottalized t’ is supposed to occur word-finally in English in words such as hit. English does not have glottalized stops; rather, this phone is an aspirated or an unreleased t (66). There is mention of a ‘zero allophone’ in tents (66); however, there is no such concept. Since tense and tents are homophonous, would the author also try to claim that a t is somehow deleted in tense, since that is what a zero allophone of t is in essence? In a similar vein, H erroneously claims that the final p in stop is a glottalized p’ (69).

One item which becomes clear early on is this volume’s wordiness. Looking carefully at the author’s style, some careful pruning would have enhanced its quality. As an illustration, it serves little purpose, in my view, for the author to talk of ‘the English language’ and ‘the Spanish language’ (1), when the designations ‘English’ and ‘Spanish’ would be adequate. This phraseology occurs numerous times throughout the work (e.g. 227). To cite another example, we read that Basque is a language isolate. The author follows this with the tautological statement: ‘As a language isolate, Basque is unrelated to any other language or family of human languages’ (75).

The final three chapters are, in many ways, the most interesting for introductory students and should be read first. Ch. 23 covers the history of the language and its dialects (332–55). Ch. 24 is on the Spanish of the Iberian Peninsula and the Canary Islands (356–68), and Ch. 25 deals with New World Spanish (369–84). The author makes a solid case for Little Havana’s being ‘different from all other U.S. Hispanic immigrant communities’ (380) although the population statistics have changed considerably from the 1982 census used (383).

Happily, there is useful glossary of terminology (393–407), although the definition of ‘word’ is the old unscientific adage: ‘the letter or series of letters between which printers leave spaces on a printed page...