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by andresgottlieb 1179 days ago
Could you please give an example of a word where th is hispanized as z?
2 comments

The phoneme 'th' does not exist in Spanish. So, we tend to mispronounce it. Many of us, at least for the native European Spanish speakers, pronounce a Spanish 'z' instead of 'th'.

By the way, the spanish phoneme 'z' is pronounced differently to the english phoneme 'z'.

Just to be more precise:

We can do that in "think" or "thanks". But not in "they". In the latter case we tend to mispronounce it as a Spanish phoneme 'd'.

Actually the sound /ð/ exists in Spanish, but it is an allophone of /d/. For example, the word dedo is pronounced as /'deðo/. That means that for a native Spanish speaker it is very difficult to learn to separate both sounds.

Taken from Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_phonology#Consonants

"The phonemes /b/, /d/, and /ɡ/ are realized as approximants (namely [β̞, ð̞, ɣ˕], hereafter represented without the downtacks) or fricatives[6] in all places except after a pause, after a nasal consonant, or—in the case of /d/—after a lateral consonant; in such contexts they are realized as voiced stops.[7] (In one region of Spain, the area around Madrid, word-final /d/ is sometimes pronounced [θ] especially in a colloquial pronunciation of its name, Madriz ([maˈðɾiθ]).[8]) "

It's more obvious with "dado".

And, if the case of participles, we just nearly butcher the in-between 'd' in -ado as -ao, simillarly to the Southern speakers from the US on lots of words.

Good point. Hispanized is not the correct term here.

What I meant is that the closest sound to "th" in Spanish would be "z" or "d" instead of "t", as other replies have pointed out.