Mixing Spanish and English language (Philological Room) Language Learning Forum

Mixing Spanish and English language
Tags: Confusion/mixing up languages \| English \| Spanish
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9 messages over 2 pages: 1 2

Superking
Diglot
Groupie
United States
polyglutwastaken.blo
Joined 6643 days ago
87 posts - 194 votes

Speaks: English*, Spanish
Studies: Mandarin

Message 9 of 9

26 January 2012 at 5:20pm | IP Logged

outcast wrote:

Volte wrote:

1) I've got a book written in a mixture of Spanish and English sitting around here somewhere... it's by a bilingual author, and frequently switches language mid-sentence. Beyond that, I don't know; there's not that much Spanish in Switzerland.

2) It's like asking what I think about using English (or any other language). It can be useful; it can be done eloquently or horribly; it can be a good or poor choice for the current situation and context.

3) Multilingual, but the languages I actively speak do not include Spanish (I read Spanish, but don't speak it).

Whoever wrote that book and whoever allowed it to be published should be placed in jail.

There is no eloquence to Spanglish, or Portunhol, or any such linguistic contraptions. They should be rejected.

This has nothing to do with accepting clearly affected speech used by specific groups, mainly teenagers. I am very accepting of such because it is a form of expression more than an attempt to impose anything. Unlike "Spanglish", there is an element of creativity... there is no creativity in switching languages just for the sake of it.

Whoever can undersand this will win respect from me:

http://img251.imageshack.us/img251/1664/flogglandia.png

You're not serious, are you? How can you state that there is no creativity in ANY individual form of language? Language is a constant, neverending creation act, whether it's English, Spanish, some mix of the two, or any permutation of the world's languages that you can think of.

I can only assume that your jail comment was hyperbole so I won't dwell on that, but what basis do you have for stating that there is no "eloquence" to codeswitching between two languages? Beyond that, explain your rationale for the seeming implication that a lack of eloquence is grounds for rejection.

Spanglish, for me, is a beautiful thing. I try to avoid it when my motivation is avoiding a word I don't know or find it hard to say, but I embrace it in a bilingual setting when the idea I want to express simply sounds better in the other language, or when there is not an exact replacement for what I want to say in the lanugage I'm currently speaking.

A great example is the word "anyway." Take the English sentence, "It's too late now, anyway, let's just go home." An adequate Spanish translation might be, "De todas formas ya es tarde, vamos para la casa." But being a native English speaker, I'm used to placing that "anyway/de todas formas" after the "it's too late now," rather than before it. So it's very common for me to say, "Ya es tarde, anyway, vamos para la casa." It's not that there isn't an adequate translation... I just like "anyway" better, and if the other person speaks both languages, then there's no harm, no foul. I know native Spanish speakers who use "anyway" in their Spanish after having learned English... you call it a felony, I call it creativity at its finest.

I should note that I do the same thing the other way around, with the Spanish phrase "o sea." There simply isn't an equivalent phrase in English that 1. feels comfortable in conversation, and 2. goes in the exact same spot in a sentence that "o sea" does.

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