Last night when I was tutoring my 3rd grade boy, he asked me to spell the word "duck". So I spelled it in my American accent: dee-you-see-kay. He didn't understand.
So I spelled it in Castellano "day-ooh-say-kah"
"WHAT?"
"day... ooh.... say...."
"WHAT?"
say! ah-bay-say- ay bee sea!
"thay?"
Yes, Mauro, thay.
This caused him to erupt into a giggle spell for about 5 minutes, at my funny accent and continued to test my pronunciation versus his.
Here in Spain, speakers of Castellano pronounce their soft "c" as "thay" with a lisp. Gracias becomes Grathias, cocinar is cothinar and so on.
Urban legend says that King Ferdinand back in the day had a lisp, and everyone copied him, and that's why there is a lisp today, but that's just an urban legend.
Well, this is an issue for me in instances like this one, and many others where I need to spell, or answer questions, especially with my students who don't recognize "say" as the letter C and the end result is them thinking that I'm crazy or stupid.
I always have to explain to people that because America is so close to Central and South America, when I learned Spanish in school, I learned a different dialect and different accent. The first time I heard the Spanish "lisp" I was already 18 years old- one of my college professors was from Spain! In the past all of my teacher's had been like me and learned Spanish in school, from teachers who spoke a Latin American dialect!
Don't even get me started on the sound of the letter J!
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