this post was submitted on 24 May 2025
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Spanish doesn't have the /ks/ consonant cluster, does it? like the 'c' in "acelerar" is pronounced like /s/, not /ks/ like in English "accelerate" right? I can't think of any words with /ks/, anyway. Consonant clusters are often hard if you didn't grow up speaking them. Plus the /ks/ in Latinx is final, and final consonant clusters are extra tricky, especially since Spanish words mostly end with vowel (+ {s,r,n}). So I assumed it'd be tricky for Spanish speakers, the way that initial 's' is (this I know firsthand, since my boss always pronounces "stress" as "estrés" even though he's very fluent in English.)
Maybe it's gotten easier now that most kids grow up studying English? Idk, I'm really surprised to hear it's easy to pronounce.
If my boss has a thick accent doesn't that mean it's hard to pronounce for Spanish speakers? Obviously it's not hard to pronounce English words if you have a good English accent.
the sh in shadow isn't /s/ though, it's /ʃ/. and I'm specifically claiming that no Spanish words start with s+hard consonant. s by itself is fine, for example sonriar obviously, but I claim that no Spanish word starts with 'st', 'sp', 'sc' etc. so you have estudiar, espalda, escuela. in Latin these were stūdium, spātula, schōla. Spanish added an e before the s specifically because it became hard for them to pronounce. this same shift happened in French, hence étude and ecòle, but not in Italian (studio and scuola.)
so I think you have it the wrong way around. the reason Spanish has those initial es in the first place is because it's hard to pronounce consonant clusters without them.