Comment présenter un phonème moribond

Abstract

SummaryDuring the 19th century the old palatallof French (in, e.g.,travailler, travail,fille) definitively gave way to /j/. During about the same period Spanish underwent a similar evolution, but the process of substitution of /j/ for /ʎ/ found itself in a less advanced stage than in French; indeed, certain varieties of present-day Spanish still maintain these two phonemes. Taking all the works together which during the 19th and the first half of the 20th century were addressed to the teaching of French to speakers of Spanish, the author concentrates his attention on the difficulties that the authors encountered when presenting this dying or already deceased phoneme (namely, the palatallof French) to an audience which, although it still possessed this phoneme in their own language, had begun to find it difficult to distinguish the diverse phonetic realizations that the Spanish /j/ was acquiring. As is shown in this study, the time difference in the evolution of this phenomenon of dephonologization in French and, with some delay, also in Spanish led the authors of these textbooks to misunderstandings and errors in the treatment of the disappearing or vanished former palatallof French.