How is it that b and v are the same for Spanish speakers and different for English speakers? Who’s right?

allthingslinguistic:

matterofawesome:

allthingslinguistic:

Both! Neither! Let me explain. 

The big thing we need to do here is distinguish between sounds and spelling. English speakers already know that their orthography is out to lunch, but Spanish has a reputation for having a logical, consistent, “phonetic”  spelling system. Most of the time, that’s true (English vowels use 5-6 symbols to stand for ~14 sounds, for example, whereas Spanish has 5 vowel symbols and 5 vowel sounds), but for b and v it’s actually the opposite. 

For the sake of clarity, I’m going to write “b” and “v” to refer to the letters in the conventional spellings of each language, and /b/ and /v/ to refer to the sounds as they’re represented in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). 

IPA uses /b/ to represent a bilabial stop – that’s a sound produced by fully closing (stopping up) the two lips (bilabial).  And it uses /v/ to represent a labiodental fricative – that’s a sound produced by letting a tiny amount of air escape between (fricative) the lip (labio-) and teeth (dental). (And yes, technically you could make an equally etymologically correct labiodental stop using the top lips and bottom teeth, but languages don’t tend to do this, presumably because it’s incredibly awkward.) 

Keep reading

English speaking friends: now you know why Baltimore and Voldemort sound almost the same to my pretty Mexican ears. 

THIS is the example I should have used.