Last night there was some discussion between some of my Spanish and Colombian friends about why the letters z and c (when followed by e or i) are pronounced \/\u03b8\/ – like the th in thin – in most of Spain, apart from in Andalusia and the Canary Islands, and as \/s\/ in the rest of the Spanish-speaking world. <\/p>\n
Pronouncing the c and z like this is known as ceceo\/cecear<\/em> in Spanish, which also means to lisp, and pronouncing them as \/s\/ is known as seseo\/sesear<\/em>.<\/p>\n There’s a legend that a Spanish king, specifically Pedro of Castile, spoke with a lisp, and that this pronunciation became fashionable among the rest of the population. While it’s true that Pedro did have a slightly lisp, as mentioned in the chronicle of L\u00f3pez de Ayala, he reigned in the 14th century, and the \/\u03b8\/ pronunciation emerged during the 16th century. Moreover, a lisp would apply to all instances of the \/s\/ sound, not just those written with c or z. <\/p>\n In the 15th century c before e and i, and \u00e7 before a, o and u was pronounced \/t\u0361s\u032a\/, z was pronounced \/z\u032a\/ and s was pronounced \/s\u033a\/, or \/z\u033a\/ between vowels. By the end of that century c\/\u00e7 was being pronounced \/s\u032a\/, which later became \/\u03b8\/. The pronunciation of the other letters changed as well, although not in all parts of Spain.<\/p>\n Spanish people began colonising the Americas in the 16th century, and many of them came from southern Spain, where the \/\u03b8\/ sound was not used. To this day their descendants do not make the distinction between s, c and z that is made in the Spanish of Spain.<\/p>\n More details can be found on: Last night there was some discussion between some of my Spanish and Colombian friends about why the letters z and c (when followed by e or i) are pronounced \/\u03b8\/ – like the th in thin – in most of Spain, apart from in Andalusia and the Canary Islands, and as \/s\/ in the rest […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,10,64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-language","category-spanish"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11210","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11210"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11210\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nhttp:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Phonological_history_of_Spanish_coronal_fricatives<\/a>
\nhttp:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Spanish_language<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"