"its" or "it's" ?

[Tony M]

Hi Urban

Yeah, the v/b and c/s can be troublesome if you haven't seen the word written before. I didn't know about the l/r confusion; that doesn't happen here in Spain.

The nice thing about Spanish is that you can unambiguously pronounce a word when you see it written (taking into account local accents of course), although the converse isn't always true.

Tony

[Inkanyezi]

The b/v confusion is a bit funny, because there are some words where most Spanish speakers do pronounce the two letters differently, most notably the name Bolívar. In South America it is very common to pronounce b and v just as in English, although they don't know the difference and don't hear it themselves. The l/r swap is just Santiago de Cuba, I haven't heard it elsewhere, and many only swap r to l, but not the other way. And there's notable s-dropping, even in the beginning of words, so that "estoy" becomes "toy" and "esta" becomes "ta". Hence the name Tamara can become "tamala", which means she's bad...

I guess I'm spinning off at a tangent far from the subject now, but there has been some confusion. When I first learned Spanish, it was with Bolivians, Peruvians, Chileans and Argentinians. I was playing in a band with an Argentinian band leader for a long time, and I learned to speak as in Buenos Aires. In BA "coger" is a four letter word (f**k), and "wawa" is a baby in the southern cone, while in Cuba "coger" is used as in Spain and "guagua" (pronounced wawa) is a bus. So when they say that they will take the bus, it is "coger la guagua", For me, it was impossible to say for about a year, I just couldn't take those words in my mouth.

Then, after about two years, I had no problem at all saying "coger una guagua", but nevertheless, I stumbled upon another false friend while rehearsing with a band of seven ladies that I was supporting at the time. The band leader's tres was out of tune, and I said to her: "¡Oye Zule, pásame el tres, que lo voy a templar!" And to my astonishment, it was followed by dead silence and seven ladies staring at me in awe, trying to fathom what they had just heard the Swede say. "Templar" is that same f-word in Cuba. But in Argentina, it's just to tune the instrument.

Below is a Cuban tres, a small guitar-like instrument with three double strings. I took it when I was figuring out how to use tilt to get the focus plane at a different angle than parallel to the sensor.

[davidedric]

Joder! This is tricky. I've been trying to understand the meanderings of "x" and "j" en espanol. Can either of you gentlemen enlighten me?

[Inkanyezi]

Joder! This is tricky. I've been trying to understand the meanderings of "x" and "j" en espanol. Can either of you gentlemen enlighten me?

It's not really many meandrings, but it reflects older times, when spelling was different from now. In Spain, many words with X have changed their spelling to J, most of them names, and maybe the most notable example is México, which in Spain is written as Méjico. In all other parts of the Spanish-speaking world, we write México, but the pronunciation is the same. Then there are lots of names, as Javier/Xavier, Jimena/Ximena. In almost all of those cases, X is pronounced exactly as J. I have heard only one exception so far, and that is the name Xiomara, which is pronounced as Ksiomara by many Cubans. In modern Iberian Spanish, spelling is mostly with J in the beginning of those names, although in Catalunya, they spell with X. There's a discussion on the topic at http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=4581

[davidedric]

Gracias, o tack so mycket (apologies for the lack of accents!)

[xpatUSA]

Oh, my wife is Cuban, so I won't have to apologise a lot.

My last Spanish tutor was a lady from Santiago de Cuba. So, some pronunciation had to be re-learned. I especially remember having to pronounce "ll" not as the English "y" but as a sort of "djy" like as in ¿como se djyama?

And a good bit of traveling in Mexico pretty much destroyed my "proper" spanish spanish, aieee ;-)

Feliz Ano Nuevo (just kidding) . . .

[Inkanyezi]

My last Spanish tutor was a lady from Santiago de Cuba. So, some pronunciation had to be re-learned. I especially remember having to pronounce "ll" not as the English "y" but as a sort of "djy" like as in ¿como se djyama?

And a good bit of traveling in Mexico pretty much destroyed my "proper" spanish spanish, aieee ;-)

Feliz Ano Nuevo (just kidding) . . .

Another confusion point for native speakers is ll/y, and there are also other quirks, particularly in Cuba, where proper names are often spelled in a funny way, but intended to be pronounced in a particular way. There was a name law adopted at some time, that names should be phonetically written, and it has been stretched a bit. Hence Dianelis and Yanelis are pronounced the same, and as usual, many people have problems knowing whether spelling should be with ll or y in some words. There is also the famous Y generation, with the prevalence of Y spelling of names as Yusmail (yes, it is US Mail the Cuban way) and Yusneivis (you might have guessed: US Navy). The ll/y confusion is one of the things my wife often consults me about. She often is unsure of which one to use.

[Inkanyezi]

The nice thing about Spanish is that you can unambiguously pronounce a word when you see it written (taking into account local accents of course), although the converse isn't always true.

When comparing Argentinian accents with more mainstream Spanish, the above rings very true, although it is valid for all vernaculars that I know of. There's a particular quirk in Argentinian pronunciation, regarding double-r and double-l, which are pronounced identically in most Argentinian dialects, although the sound differs, from resembling French "j" in the eastern parts of the country, to an unvoiced "sh" in the higher regions. Uruguayan pronunciation is similar. I have dropped that pronunciation since a couple of years, and it comes back to me only when speaking to Argentinians or singing songs that are from Argentina. I don't know whether it is useful for anyone to learn it, because Argentinians don't have any problem of understanding other accents of Spanish, while the converse maybe isn't true. So my "local accent" has gradually changed from Porteño (Buenos Aires, with a touch of Lunfardo) to Cuban during the last ten years.

[davidedric]

My Spanish tutor is from Buenos Aires and we have a mixture of pronunciations. Mostly we use castilian pronunciation so far as ll and rr is concerned, but stay South American for c/s. Heaven knows what I sound like in Spain! Che!

[scriveyn]

Amusing thread.

But seriously I have no wish to americanise my English and that spell check really needs to be fixed. On the positive side, when it redlines my words, I know I am right!

Umm, I think you will find that the spell checker has nothing to do with CiC; it is your browser that is at fault.

You can make Firefox spell check in real (i.e. British) English by installing the British English dictionary. I don't know if there is an equivalent for IE.

Ken

There is the same option in the Opera browser. Just set your preferred language to British English.

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[rpcrowe]

Speaking of proper education. Whatever that means!

As a prelude to my master's degree program at San Diego State University which I began in 1990; I was required to take the Graduate Record Examination (GRE). In the hand-out accompanying that test, the average scores of students with degrees in diferent disciplines were correlated against the various sections of the test such as: Math, Art, English; Social Studies, etc.

Guess which discipline consistantly scored the lowest scores in all sections of the GRE? Those students whose bachelor's degrees were in EDUCATION Wow!

[William W]

This thread has over seventy responses . . . and yes I can see it.

haha

[Jeff S]

(1) I'm always catching myself mistyping: to, two, too. More than two to's are too many. (Is to's even a word?). Isn't this a sentence that is impossible to write and spell correctly?

(2) Of course the wag can always add a fourth choice: tutus.

(Clearly, I have too much time on my hands to be dealing with these two items.)

[stuck]

(1)...More than two to's are too many. (Is to's even a word?)...

No, it's not a word. The position of your apostrophe between the o and the s implies a contraction or a possessive but your sentence requires a plural. You should have typed tos. Don't think that's a word either!

Ken