In a previous post, I described the two r sounds of Spanish — the trill of carro and the flap of caro — and why linguists think r is interesting. How did Spanish end up with these two different flavors of r?
The spelling of carro and caro us a strong hint: Latin had both long and short r, along with long and short versions of other consonants. The difference between Latin carrus and carus wasn’t how the r sounds were made, but how long they were held. Spanish did away with the length difference but compensated by introducing the trill/flap difference.
This is consistent with a larger pattern: except for long mm versus short m, which simply merged, Spanish found a substitute for all of Latin’s consonant length contrasts. My favorite other example is Latin’s long nn, which turned into Spanish ñ , as in año “year” (from Latin annus).
Any changes to long consonants generally also applied to short consonants at the beginning of a word. This explains why words beginning with r (like real) are trilled, even though they had a short r in Latin and are still spelled with a single r.
Thank you so much for your posts. They are fascinating and give lots of insights to why we speak the way we do.
I’ve been curious about why we pronounce the rr and r at the beginning of words but cannot find the answer.
Does it have to do with any ethnic influence?
Miguel, please forgive the long delay in this reply. For some reason, WordPress hasn’t been forwarding comments to my email, so I didn’t realize that several had accumulated!
I consulted my usual go-to resource for questions like this — Ralph Penny’s A History of the Spanish Language, and learned that the initial rolled ‘r’ in words like rojo is part of a larger pattern. Penny explains that Latin initial consonants (that is, consonants at the beginning of a word) generally had the same outcome in Spanish as their corresponding doubled (“geminate”) Latin medial consonants (that is, consonants that appeared mid-word). For example, initial Latin /t/ (as in terra ‘earth’) and medial geminate /tt/ (as in gutta ‘drop’) both emerged as a single /t/ in Spanish (tierra, gota). Likewise, since medial /rr/ become a trill (as in, again terra), so did initial /r/ as in Latin russus ‘red’, the source of Spanish rojo.