PHONETIC NATURE OFTHE CONSONANTE‘YE’IN SPANISH

Abstract

When RAE (2011:174) deals with the phoneme /?/, it says that is a voiceless fricative sound. The CD that goes with the Fónetica y Fonología states that the consonant /?/ is usually produced as a fricative prepalatal. And the allowed variants (besides the fricative) are an affricate variant and a non - fricative variant that they transcribe as /?/. Navarro Tomás (1946: 9) said, « the y from mayo, with a smooth, affricate or rehilante pronunciation constitutes a single phonological unit» . In this statement Navarro Tomás does not use the term « fricative » b ut he speaks of «smooth » and «rehilantes» variants. In previous work about fricatives (1943) he maintained that fricatives are sounds that have «rehilamiento» (what has been called in English tradition a turbulent airstream) ; thus, the rehilantes are the f ricatives and what we call nowadays approximants are smooth consonants. He admitted that the consonant ‘ye’ could have those three allophones.The aim of this paper is to prove both that the approximant variant exists and that is the most used allophone. In order to do so, we use a method that measures the existing noise in the sound production in a special way. It is known as zero - crossing . The final conclusion confirms the hypothesis: the more usual production of the Spanish consonant ‘ye’ is approximant and palatal.