Talk:spic

I've put this as the etymology: "Imitative of a Hispanic pronunciation of speak" - is this correct? — Paul G 18:20, 15 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I'd always heard it was from "no spic inglish" (i.e., "I don't speak English"), so yes, but I don't have a definitive example (or any great desire to find one) -dmh 18:24, 15 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I've always wondered where they got the pronunciation from, though. There is no "ih" sound in Spanish; the word "speak" is said almost exactly like the "proper" pronunciation, but with a lighter k sound at the end, almost like a glottal stop. So, "no speak English" would be pronounced similar to "noh speek inglees". 76.95.40.6 06:10, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Isn't it possible that it comes from the word "Hispanic" itself? Gy7hu8 21:24, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

Ive seen that etymology proposed as an alternate, but it goes strongly against the pattern of preserving the stressed syllable when forming contractions. —Soap— 18:34, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Though US English is often transcribed without vowel length, the phoneme /i/ is generally long, thus [spiːk] or at least [spiˑk]. With a Latin American accent the /i/ is truly short: [spik]. And this shortness can very well be imitated by using the short English /ɪ/ phoneme. So phonetically the "speak" etymology does make sense. (Nevertheless I do find the similarity to "Hispanic" conspicuous.) 90.186.72.105 00:56, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

two things that could help settle this ..... 1) seeing it in its earliest use not for Hispanics only but for other immigrant groups who could not speak English. 2) the redlinked forms such as spiggoty that seem to appear in every etymological explanation but which havent survived to the modern day. we could potentially seat two kings on one throne if it turns out these earlier forms were also broader in meaning, such as including Italian immigrants (the inserted vowel sounds more like a stereotypical Italian accent than a Spanish one). spiggoty seems citable through this link, and again i give my thanks to archive.org for accepting my query string as typed instead of googlerizing it and giving me results about water faucets. those hits on archive.org are largely duplicates of each other, but still i'm pretty sure it will pass CFI. all thats left is to pin down the meaning. best wishes, —Soap— 11:27, 23 August 2023 (UTC)