I dunno if I’ve ranted about this before, but I think it’s pretty fucked up that references like Wikipedia insist on using European Spanish pronunciations for shit in Latin America, when that’s a tiny fraction of Spanish speakers overall. And it just reeks to me of a colonialist/Eurocentrist mindset.
And the worst part is, it doesn’t even make sense. Latin American Spanish is “relatively” easy to grasp for Americans, because they use a lot of the same prounciations as English. But European Spanish is still loaded with these unusual, arcane phonemes that have long since been dropped in Latin America.
And it’s telling to me that even British people, who are nowhere near as exposed to Latin America as us Americans, tend to use Latin American prounciations (or approximations thereof) for Spanish words.
I feel like this warrants a larger debate, but I’m not really good at academic stuff.
In light of recent complaints about Gaelic railway signs oppressing poor English speakers a monoglot map for the lowlands is being piloted. Here is a small sample.
Mark Alexander Boyd, Scottish poet, Latin Scholar and soldier of fortune died on April 10th 1601
He was born in Ayrshire, and was educated under the care of his uncle, the Archbishop of Glasgow.
Boyd left Scotland for France as a young man. There he studied civil law. He took part in the religious wars of the League, fighting on the Catholic side during the civil war.
He had two collections of Latin poems published, in 1590 and 1592, at a time when he was in south-west France. He returned to Scotland only at the end of his life.
According to what I can find he only wrote one poem in Scots, a sonnet which was attributed to him in 1900. It’s a wee cracker of a poem though.
Sonet of Venus and Cupid by Mark Alexander Boyd.
Fra banc to banc, fra wod to wod, I rin Ourhailit with my feble fantasie, Lyk til a leif that fallis from a trie Or til a reid ourblawin with the wind. Twa gods gyds me: the ane of tham is blind, Ye, and a bairn brocht up in vanitie; The nixt a wyf ingenrit of the se, And lichter nor a dauphin with hir fin.
Unhappie is the man for evirmair That teils the sand and sawis in the aire; Bot twyse unhappier is he, I lairn, That feidis in his hairt a mad desyre, And follows on a woman throw the fyre, Led be a blind and teichit be a bairn.
I’m taking Spanish classes, and I think I’ve identified three kinds of Spanish words so far
1) It’s pronounced like in Italian, but it’s written differently
2) It’s written like in Italian, but it’s pronounced differently.
3) It fucking looks like French but has a completely different pronunciation.
So, basically, I’m confused but happy as fuck. I love Spanish.
How I picture Sara every time 1, 2 or 3 happen:
At least Spanish has rules of pronunciation (?)
Btw, I think this is why a native speaker of a romance language can read and understand the basic meaning of texts in other romance languages, but is totally or almost totally lost when it comes to understand someone speaking in those same languages.
Yes, thankfully Spanish does have pronunciation rules, and they’re not even that hard to remember. I still distractedly write gn instead of ñ from time to time, but I’m getting better at it.
Honestly, the funniest thing about these Spanish classes is how literally every one of us instinctively resorts to other foreign languages when struggling with Spanish. It’s like our brains collectively go: “Okay, I need to speak a foreign language, I’ve got this. Is it English? French?? Latin??? Oh fuck it”
I just realized your eyes must bleed when you see words like “ñoqui” or “capuchino” XD
I think number 3 was kicking in for me when I took both Spanish and French in the 9th grade. At first similarities between the two languages made learning two at once easier, but by the end of the year, I remember sometimes thinking of a word and not being able to remember which language it belonged to.
I had my Bat Mitzvah when I was first learning Spanish and I would keep pronouncing all the “j” sounds in Spanish words as “ch” like in Hebrew (that really guttural, throaty sound for people who don’t know) and then the other kids would look at me funny.
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