Dathi wrote:But if the local dialect of Spanish used starts pronouncing initial 'h's (more distinctly?), possibly due to influence from English or other languages (maybe even harder, like a Greek or Russian X), then 'y' would make far more sense.
English went from 'an historian' to 'a historian', for instance, which is a similar sort of change.
English, often, has 'spelling pronunciations' (like some people pronouncing the 't' in 'often'), and other languages do, too. French used to pronounce 'il y a' as basically 'ya' (and it's still colloquial in e.g. Québec), but due to spelling pronunciation, the 'l' is now sounded.
These changes are, of course, possible, and your points are certainly valid. Still, I find such changes unlikely.
In the first place, "h" in Spanish is completely silent, not simply less distinctively pronounced. This is a change from over a thousand years ago, when Spanish more closely resembled the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire.
At that time, "hijo" was "filio". Over the centuries, especially during the period of Moorish occupation of Spain, the initial "f" became silent, and the "h" now only serves as a place-holder for the now-vanished "f". There are very few words in Modern Spanish that begin with "h" that also began with "h" in Latin. In my copy of the
Oxford Spanish-English Dictionary I couldn't find a single Spanish word that begins with an "h" followed by an "i" or "y", that is neither a word that was imported from a non-Romance language nor a case of the replacement of "h" for a silent "f".
(By the way, the initial letter "f" did not become silent and replaced by "h" in all of the Spanish words that come from Latin, although it did do so in a large number of them. The words in modern Portuguese and Italian that come from the same Latin roots still begin with a non-silent "f".)
It is true that in the Québécois dialect "il y a" is pronounced "ya". As well, throughout the Americas, the "z" and soft "c" in Spanish are pronounced like the "s" in "seal", while in Spain they are pronounced like the "th" in "think".
But in the case of the French "il y a" and the Spanish "z" such deviations from standard are the continued use of pronunciations from earlier, perhaps less literate, eras. They are not new pronunciations that developed locally.
Also, it is true that Americans almost universally say "a historian" rather than "an historian", but some British speakers, especially public-school-educated ones, still say and write "an historian", even if they pronounce the "h" as Americans do. After all, there is no official "Academy" that defines "standard" English.
However, there are such "Academies" for Spanish, French, German, and many other European languages, that define the standards for those languages.
The Real Académia Española (RAE) was founded in 1713, and everywhere Spanish is spoken (or written), the spelling of words set by the RAE is strictly followed, no matter how local pronunciation might vary from that of Spain. This has been the case for at least 250 years, and there is no reason to believe that is will not be the case for another 250, or even 500 years.
Since its founding, the only major changes in spelling that have been sanctioned by the RAE have been the replacement of "x" with "j" for the rough "h" sound, the change of the standard pronunciation of "x" from rough "h" to "ks" (as in English), and most recently, designation of the digraphs "ch", "ll", and "rr" as being two-letter combinations, rather than as single letters, as they had been previously regarded (which, of course, only affects alphabetical order in dictionaries, etc).
So there is no reason to believe that "Tomás y Hijos" would be regarded as correct Spanish spelling even 500 years in the future (unless, of course, the author says it was so for purposes of the story, which David Weber, as far as I know, has never said).
No, it was simply a trivial mistake. There is no reason to believe that, it being an error in Spanish, the author or any of the editors would even have been aware it was an error before publication.
Mike
