Question regarding pronunciations in the dictionary

Question

I have noticed that in the SpanishDict.com dictionary entries that video pronunciations seem to use Latin American pronunciations but the written pronunciation guide in the definition is for peninsular Spanish.

Por ejemplo: Cielo is pronounced like "See-ay-lo" in the video definition but written "The-ay-lo" in the written pronunciation next to the word.

I'm not complaining as it is nice to have both, I've just never seen this explained anywhere on the website. I checked a few other words and this pattern seems to be consistent.

Answer 1

It doesn't matter: both "See-ay-lo" and "The-ay-lo" do not sound like Spanish at all, but English. But in any case, the pronunciation used in the south of Spain (even before Columbus discovered the Americas) and Latin America is not 100% different from the one used in the north of Spain: you just change the "th" sound for an "s". Not exactly rocket science.

It is your vowels you really need to work on to sound right, not change a "th" for an "s", and using those "ay-lo" pseudo-phonetic rubbish you will never achieve it, because those are English sounds, not Spanish.

Answer 2

I think when you say written in peninsular Spanish, you are actually referring to "el español castellano". In phonetics when a "c" comes before an "e" or an "i" its fonema (unit of sound) is represented by /s/ except in el español castellano where it is represented by /theta/ (sorry I don't have a phonetic keyboard yet). This is what makes people think that people from Spain have a lisp. In most good dictionaries they are transcribed in both ways. For some reason here they say it one way, and write it another.