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The Spanish language is written using the Spanish alphabet, which is the ISO Latin script with one additional letter, eñe ñ , for a total of 27 letters. [1] Although the letters k and w are part of the alphabet, they appear only in loanwords such as karate, kilo, waterpolo and wolframio (tungsten or wolfram) and in sensational spellings: okupa, bakalao.
At the start of a syllable, there is a contrast between three nasal consonants: /m/, /n/, and /ɲ/ (as in cama 'bed', cana 'grey hair', caña 'sugar cane'), but at the end of a syllable, this contrast is generally neutralized, as nasals assimilate to the place of articulation of the following consonant [9] —even across a word boundary.
This is the pronunciation key for IPA transcriptions of Spanish on Wikipedia. It provides a set of symbols to represent the pronunciation of Spanish in Wikipedia articles, and example words that illustrate the sounds that correspond to them.
The digraph is found at the end of a word (deci, atunci, copaci) or before the letters a, o, or u (ciorba, ciuleandra); the /tʃ/ sound made by the letter c in front of the letters e or i becomes /k/ in front of the three aforementioned vowels, making the addition of the letter i necessary.
I noticed that someone had chosen the word bed to represent the /e/ sound in Spanish, but that is only useful if you speak the Australian, New Zealand or South African English dialect, where the /e/ in bed sounds like the /e/ in ballet, and therefore is a good match for the Spanish /e/. Skol fir 19:27, 12 April 2010 (UTC)
In historical linguistics, a sound change is a change in the pronunciation of a language. A sound change can involve the replacement of one speech sound (or, more generally, one phonetic feature value) by a different one (called phonetic change) or a more general change to the speech sounds that exist (phonological change), such as the merger of two sounds or the creation of a new sound.
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The [ts] sound also occurs in European Spanish in loanwords of Basque origin (but only learned loanwords, not those inherited from Roman times), as in abertzale. In colloquial Castilian it may be replaced by /tʃ/ or /θ/. In Bolivian, Paraguayan, and Coastal Peruvian Spanish, [ts] also occurs in loanwords of Japanese origin. [citation needed]