Re: Dialects of certain langs

On Thu, Jan 29, 2004 at 07:35:47PM -0300, Pablo David Flores wrote:
> AFAIK the dialects of Spanish differ as follows...
[...]
> Morphologically:
>
> Two major splits here.
>
> 1) European Spanish vs. Latin American Spanish on the issue of
> the second person plural pronoun and the corresponding verb
> forms. Spain has "vosotros" with a second person plural verb,
> while Latin America has "ustedes" with a *third* person plural
> verb.
A slight clarification, if I may.  European Spanish maintains a
familiar/polite distinction between "vosotros" (plural of "tú")
and "ustedes" (plural of "usted"), the former being familiar and
the latter being polite.  Latin American Spanish has the "tú"/"usted"
distinction in the singular, but always uses "ustedes" in the plural.

> 2) Various LA dialects on the issue of the second person singular
> pronoun (and verb forms). There are dialects that use the pronoun
> "tú" as in Spain, and others (most notably Rioplatense) that use
> "vos" with a different verb form (resembling the plural form used
> with "vosotros" in Spain).
Actually, the usual "vos" form of the verb is identical to the "tú" form
except for the emphasis, at least in the present tense: "tú hablas" /tu'aBlas/
vs. "vos hablás" /bosa'Blas/.  The "vosotros" form replaces the plain vowel
in these forms with a diphthong: "vosotros hablais" /bosot4osaBlajs/.

> European Spanish also uses the object pronouns "le", "les" for
> verb objects that refer to male people, reserving "lo", "los" for
> masculine non-personal objects and "la", "las" for feminine
> referrents and female people. Latin American Spanish only
> distinguishes gender, not animacy, so only "lo(s)" and "la(s)"
> are used for direct objects, while "le(s)" is used for INDIRECT
> objects of any gender.
Interesting.  Didn't know about that one.

-Mark