Re: Spanish ll in different dialects

On Sunday 29 August 2004 09:25 am, Mark J. Reed wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 29, 2004 at 12:53:02AM -0400, David Peterson wrote:
> >    <humor>
> >    " 'We', white man?"
> >    -Tanto to the Lone Ranger after the latter said, "Looks like we're
> >    surrounded!",
> >    upon discovering that they were surrounded by "Indians".</humor>
>
> Nit: spelled "Tonto", despite being pronounced as an Americanized
> version of /'tan.to/.  I don't know if the use of the Spanish word for
> "fool" was deliberate.
>
> -Marcos, who had a dream the other night that Jay Silverheels really
> wanted to be a classical musician
One of the subgroups of the Apache are the Tonto Apache,  whose (original?)
territory was in and around the Tonto Basin (Range? there's a Western novel
titled "Under the Tonto Rim") . The insult is of course probably deliberate:
they probably didn't call themselves the Tonto. (Or maube their name for
themselves sounded a little like Tonto to their Spanish speaking enemis.) And
the territory was probably named after them rather than vice versa.

On the other hand, there is a persistent rumor that Kemo Sabe also means idiot
(or something worse) in some language or other...

ObConlang: During the Occupation, the Shayanans were always careful to use the
long form of the name of the Imperial Security Police instead of the short
form that was equivalent to KGB or Gestapo. They used the short form among
themselves with considerable satisfaction, though. The short form, when
mutated through Shayanan pronunciation, sounds exactly like FENFI, a common
word for a blood-sucking swamp parasite (approx. = leech).   Cue running
jokes about truth in advertising...
--
Elyse Grasso

The World of Cherani Station
www.data-raptors.com/cherani/index.html
Cherani Tradespeech
www.data-raptors.com/cherani/tradespeech.html

Reply