zompist bboard

Reading about Classical Nahuatl, I can mostly understand why the system developed by Spaniards to transcribe it looks the way it does except in one detail: Why did they choose to write the Nahuatl phoneme which I am pretty sure is standard [s] as either <z> or <c>? What was going on with Spanish at that time that this was the most logical way of writing down the phoneme [s]? Didn't contemporary Castilian have it?

It's also interesting to me that 16th century Castilian /ʃ/ apparently → modern /x/ or /h/, but I guess a change like that makes sense to me.

Not all [s]'s are actually the same. I don't remember the phonetic details or which types of [s] Nahuatl and Spanish have, but e.g. in present-day Basque the letters "s" and "z" are used to write two different kinds of [s]-like sounds.

I remember that 16th-century Castilian had a distinction between apical and laminal /s/, orthographically indicated as <s> versus <c/z> (I do not remember which was which), and <c/z> was used to capture which of these is used to realize Nahuatl /s/. Only later was this distinction lost in Latin American Spanish, obscuring the reasons for why Nahuatl was written with <c/z> rather than <s> for /s/.

Sumelic wrote:Not all [s]'s are actually the same. I don't remember the phonetic details or which types of [s] Nahuatl and Spanish have, but e.g. in present-day Basque the letters "s" and "z" are used to write two different kinds of [s]-like sounds.

Those are the same ones Spanish used to have at the time.

See Wikipedia.

six?! How many damn distinct coronal fricatives does one language need?!

Anyway, thanks.

So Haleza Grise wrote:six?! How many damn distinct coronal fricatives does one language need?!

[whisper]Six is just fine for Polish, but Russian thinks it's not enough and has seven or sometimes eight. Don't even ask the Caucasians, some people can't probably count up to these numbers.[/whisper]

One of those Caucasian languages, Ubykh, had 14. The language is extinct.