26 messages over 4 pages: 1 2 3 4
KingM Triglot Senior Member michaelwallaceauthor Joined 7193 days ago 275 posts - 300 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Russian
| Message 25 of 26 24 October 2005 at 11:47am | IP Logged |
Patuco,
Were you taught Castellano in school, or the local dialect? Also, is the difference between the two as significant as, say, Swiss German and High German, or more like British vs. American English?
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| patuco Diglot Moderator Gibraltar Joined 7017 days ago 3795 posts - 4268 votes Speaks: Spanish, English* Personal Language Map
| Message 26 of 26 24 October 2005 at 1:53pm | IP Logged |
KingM wrote:
Were you taught Castellano in school, or the local dialect? |
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The local dialect, llanito, is only spoken colloquailly. We are taught Castellano in school.
KingM wrote:
Also, is the difference between the two as significant as, say, Swiss German and High German, or more like British vs. American English? |
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I'm afraid that I can't speak German (yet!) so I don't know how different Swiss German is to High German. I gather that there is a significant difference between the two.
However, I do speak English and Spanish and I think that llanito differs more from Spanish than UK English differs from US English. When speaking in llanito, only someone fluent in Spanish and English could pick-up the overall gist of the conversation (it would be much worse for an English-speaking person since llanito is based on Spanish) but there are so many slang words and purely local constructions that even a truly biligual person might miss the most important point of the conversation.
Also, the speed with which we switch between English, Spanish and dialectal expressions mid-sentence might confuse them. Coupled to this, our pronounciation is not "standard". For example, we pronounce the "ch" as "sh", so "coche" (car) would be pronounced "coshe", and as I've mentioned in another post, we pronounce both "s" and "z" as "s". We also tend to "eat" the ends (and sometimes the beginnings) of certain words and contract lots of others. I believe that Cubans (and other Latin Americans?) also do this but I'm not sure.
From reading other articles on the forum, I would say that the difference is similar to that between Mandarin and Cantonese, although I'm really guessing since I know absolutely nothing about either language!
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