Re: Spanish education

| -----Original Message-----
| From: Antonio WARD
| Subject: Re: Spanish education
|
| Differences are less important than similarities. Please, do
| not ever think that we cannot understand each other.
| The grammar is the same all over. Only words (especially slang)
| change their meanings. I can give you several examples:

        Out of curiosity, what about pronunciation?
        I know that in Castilian, the "z" is usually pronounced /T/ and the
"ll" used to be pronounced "lj" (as the Catalan L-dot is still pronounced).
My Spanish teacher was from Madrid, and so I started to imitate this accent.
(I love the /T/ and /D/ sounds, so it was "nicer" for me. However, I was
told I sounded like a pofta.)
        If I remember correctly, different South American dialects from the
Andes region keep the "ll"=/lj/. Also, I was told by someone who spent a
year in Argentina that their "j" is pronounced /Z/.

        Are there any other pronunciations that are distinct of a region?

| 2) The same things happens with the word Venezuelans use
| for "jacket" which means "vagina" (in slang) in Mexico.

        I live in Florida (as mentioned), and with so many different forms
of Spanish spoken here, I get to hear great stories like this all the time.

        One of the best happened to an ex-friend of mine.
        She was a librarian working in South Texas. She had Spanish in high
school and college, so she was pushed into the roll of "bilingual
librarian".
        One day, the story she was reading was the Chinese tale of the cock
and the dragon. (It's the story of how the dragon stole the rooster's horns,
and why the rooster calls at sunrise.) She new that "cock" has two meanings
in most Spanish dialects, as in English, so she explained to the children
exactly what she was talking about. She said that there was constant
giggling, but with a glowering look or two, she kept the children under
control.
        Near the end of the story, a mother came into the reading room to be
ready to pick up her child. Now, in south Texas, most Spanish speakers are
Mexican.
        Apparently, in Mexican Spanish, the Castilian word for "dragon"
means "prostitute".

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