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The adopted’s right to know their origins constitutes an essential manifestation of the right to identity and free development of the personality of adopted persons, regulated by the articles 180, 5 and 6 of the Spanish CC and the articles 12 and 5, 1, i) of Law 54/2007, of December 28, on International Adoption. The adoptee can not only request data on his or her biological origin but also information on the identity of his or her parents and their biogenetic data. This right may conflict with the right to privacy and data protection of biological parents and family. This paper presents the double public/private aspect of the right to know the origins of adopted people. On the one hand, its extension and limits are analyzed in confrontation with the rights to privacy, intimate family and personal life and data protection of the family of origin and, on the other, we analyze the actions of Public Entities and the administration to guarantee its exercise and effectiveness. This paper is completed with the most recent jurisprudential analysis.

This paper analyses two 18th century texts and focuses on hypercorrections found in the spelling of sibilants, i.e. examples where an etymological apical fricative is represented with spelling elsewhere used for laminal fricatives. The texts used are Lubieta’s dictionary (written in the central variety of Donostia/San Sebastián) and sermons composed by Bizente Sarria (written in the western variety of Etxebarri). As for Lubieta’s text, in previous research hypercorrections have been interpreted to be related to an ongoing merger in which the apico-alveolar fricative merges with the apico-laminal, and the remaining sound is the laminal. In Sarria’s speech, however, another merger pattern was present, in which laminal and apical fricatives merge in favour of the latter. Because of that, hypercorrections found in that text are hypothesised to be purely graphical. Using quantitative methods, the paper compares the patterns found in spellings found in the two texts in order to better understand merger processes involved (and especially hypercorrections), but also to reflect on the methodology which can be used to analyse such issues.

According to Article 23 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) States Parties shall ensure the rights and responsibilities of such persons with regard to adoption of children. This article has a limited application in practice due to a traditional prejudice towards sexuality and motherhood/parenthood of these people, even proposing the adoption of their biological children. This contribution focuses on the analysis of the configuration of adoption in the aforementioned Article 23.2 CRPD, based on significant examples of Comparative Law. First, it studies the health and financial requirements for adopters, which often hide direct or indirect discrimination against the people with disabilities. Second, this paper explores the meaning of the concept of `supportˊ, which is aimed at ensuring that persons with disabilities can adopt on an equal basis with others. Third, it analyzes the scope of the expression ˊin all cases the best interests of the child shall be paramountˊ, with a view to examining whether it jeopardises the effectiveness of Article 23.2 CRPD in practice.

Intercountry adoption is a young institution that, after experiencing a boom at the beginning of the 21st century is currently immersed in a period of decline. The years 2020 to 2023 have been especially notable in this matter in Spain, as a consequence of the jurisdiction conflict, resolved by STC 36/2021, as well as the COVID-19 crisis, causing China to restrict international adoption. This paper analyzes the features that have characterized intercountry adoption in its different stages and the factors that have led to its evolution, focusing on the study of the successive regulatory swings that have occurred in Spain. As a result of this study, it is observed that, beyond the current circumstances brought about by the COVID-19 crisis, this institution currently has a residual weight that is increasingly in line with the principle of subsidiarity, recognized by the Convention of 29 May 1993 on Protection of Children and Cooperation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption.

This paper investigates a topic that is booming in Argentine jurisprudence: the declaration of the adoptability situation of children based on the informed, thoughtful, and autonomous decision of their parents -generally women who decide not to exercise their maternity– to give their child for adoption considering the obligatory gender perspective, in line with the rights of children. With this objective as a goal, the regulation of the judicial declaration of the situation of adoptability and the autonomous decision to give a daughter or son for adoption is synthesized, the exception being that the declaration in a situation of adoptability is not appropriate if a referent of the family of origin or extended family is able to take care of the child and its complementarity with the best interest of the child. At the same time, the paths taken in Argentine jurisprudence regarding the birth of children after hindering the legal interruption of pregnancy are critically analyzed.

The contrast between apical and laminal articulations in Basque dento-alveolar sibilant consonants has traditionally attracted linguists’ attention. This distributedness distinction, as it has come to be known in the literature, was assumed to be very uncommon, a sort of typological oddity (perhaps the only one) of Basque consonantism, which, in all other respects, is not particularly remarkable in terms of its phonological characteristics. Many studies have been devoted to the articulatory and acoustic properties of sibilants in Standard Basque and several dialectal varieties. In this paper, written as a contribution to this well-deserved Festschrift in honor of José Ignacio Hualde, I compare the Basque system of sibilants and its features with other structurally more or less analogous systems, drawing on recent typological research, in order to gain a more nuanced understanding of the alleged uniqueness of the Basque sibilants.

This paper reports on the development of L2 English vowel pair perception by adult L1 Spanish/Basque speakers of differing levels of English instruction. This study focuses on vowel pairs /i-ɪ/, /u-ʊ/ and /ʌ-ɔ/, with differing levels of proximity to native categories. Results of two perceptual tasks show that learners are influenced by their native categories, but that regardless of level, they can still modify their representations. However, the success in categorization varies by sound based on acoustic distance and multiple category competition.

In this paper I present an unusual Bantu tonal phenomenon where certain “cells” in the verb paradigm require a tonal agreement between the first syllable (the subject prefix) and the last syllable (an inflectional ending). Such a long-distance dependency raises the question of whether it is tone alone that can do this. I first provide an overview of the phenomenon in Ekegusii (Kenya), and then show that a relative construction in geographically and genetically distant Grassfields Bantu languages of Cameroon can help us understand both the nature and history of the more evolved situation seen in Ekegusii. I conclude that although initially surprising, initial/final tone agreement has a natural diachronic source and is not so crazy—even from a synchronic point of view.

In Chilean Spanish (Bros̀ 2018, 2019), s-aspiration is an opaque process in which [h], coda realization of /s/, surfaces morpheme internally as expected, but it overapplies in word-final prevocalic position; in absolute word-final position and in word-final preconsonantal position, deletion takes place instead. Bros̀ argues that a Stratal OT account is necessary to explain the data. Although the verdict is out on whether some degree of serialism is unavoidable in OT, this paper contends that a simpler, non-serial account of the Chilean data is preferrable to a Stratal OT one, due to greater simplicity and strict parallelism, which is more closely aligned with the spirit of OT. Additionally, the analysis presented shows that the Chilean data do not offer evidence in favor of a Stratal OT account, as a parallel explanation is possible. The proposed analysis contributes to our understanding of the Chilean data, to our knowledge of aspiration and other opaque phenomena in Spanish, and to the debate on parallelism in OT.