Re: CHAT: I need help with the concept "New World Spanish"

On Aug/31/2002, Padraic Brown wrote:

> I would tend to agree with your skeptic, as I really
> don't understand why there is a dichotomy between
> Spanish Spanish and American Spanish. We were taught
> that there is one (mostly by American Hispanics),
> based on vocabulary differences, pronunciations, etc.
        I agree with this. Saving a few dialectal differences,
"standard" spanish is the same, grammatically. In fact, you can read
books of south-american writers and books of spanish writers and the
only differences you'll find will be in some vocabulary, if any. Many
times you wouldn't even notice.

        There are, as someone else said, cases which look very
different, as the argentinean "voseo". But then, in Andalucía you have
also very different pronunciations: not only "seseo" (changing "z" by
"s"), but also "ceceo" (changing "s" by "z") and just simple ... hmmm
... aspiration/elimination of "s" (I don't know the formal name for this
:-)). For example, you could hear "esta" ("this") like "ezta" or "ehta",
depending on the zone you were. Then, you also have canarian spanish,
which has seseo too, and an accent which is many times taken as
south-american or andalusian. Most fun relative to "s" pronunciation is
Madrid/Castilla's, which is very near to a "j": "ejta".

        And nearer to me, in Galicia, you have also seseo and another
different dialectal form, "gheada", that changes the "g" sound to a "j"
sound ("jato" instead of "gato"). This is typical of the west coast, and
was a strange thing for a "countryman" like me the first time I heard it
:-)

        Excuse if I don't use IPA for this, but I don't know any O:-)
Though I'm thinking that it would be useful r:-)

        But the grammar is always the same, so I think that a different
group would be overkill. It's just like different dialects of the same
tongue. For example, a friend of mine is writing a book for both spain
spanish and south-american spanish, and the only things that the
editors told him was to take care with the vocabulary, not with anything
else (i.e., use "computadora" instead of "ordenador", and avoid
conflictive words like "coger").

> verb form. No dialect in Spain I'm aware of uses vos
> anymore (not for a few centuries, anyway). On the
        Though it's curious that people in Andalucia and Canary Islands
use the form "ustedes" instead of "vosotros", using the "normal" verbal
form instead of the "courteous" one: "ustedes coméis aquí" ("you eat
here"), for example.

--
        Roberto Suarez Soto

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