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 Language Learning Forum : Collaborative writing |  | |
 Hencke Tetraglot Moderator Spain Joined 6676 days ago 2340 posts - 2444 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, Finnish, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 1 of 1 24 January 2006 at 1:38pm | IP Logged |
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Oh, I didn't do my homework and didn't discover this room in the forum until now. No wonder the admin didn't answer my mail. These comments belong here instead.
I saw that the Spanish page has been updated after the recent thread about languages vs. dialects. The current text is a much better description of that subject. I still have an issue there, about Valencian being calledd a language when it is a dialect of Catalan, but I will come back with that one shortly with a few references. These are all great pages, including the Spanish one. Please understand that I don't want to complain, but contribute with my input to make them even better. In that spirit I want to raise the following two points about the Spanish page: ------------------------------------------------------ 1. In Madrid, people pronounce 'S's in a wet and whistling fashion that recalls mating snakes. ------------------------------------------------------ I was baffled to read this, since I have lived in Madrid for the past 17 years and have never come across any claim like this before. I can't imagine what sound it refers to or where such a claim comes from !!?? S is not pronounced any different in Madrid than in the rest of Spain (except in the south, see below), and the pronunciation is very close (identical in my ears) to an english S eg. like in "kiss". In the south of Spain, the Andalucian variants have an S that is more pointed, identical, or very close, to the Swedish S. I wouldn't call it whistling but maybe a little closer to a whistle than the regular Madrid-S. (As a parenthesis and just in case, though I cannot think that is the case, but _if_ it was the lisping Z-sound that this statement referred to, then firstly the statement is factually incorrect, since that is not an S but a different sound, existing in Spanish _as well as_, not _instead of_ S (and absent in most SA-variants). Secondly this Spanish Z is rather close to the lisping sound found in English eg. "th" in "thing" and shouldn't present any real difficulty to an English-speaker or conjure up images of mating snakes !!?? Thirdly it is in no way specific to Madrid, but in general use in most of Spain, except the south.) ------------------------------------------------------ 2. "Spaniards generally use Vosotros instead of Ustedes." ------------------------------------------------------ This is factually incorrect. "Vosotros" is not used _in stead of_ but _as well as_ Ustedes, and they mean different things. Vosotros is the familiar 2nd person plural and Ustedes the polite plural "you", grammatically 3rd person. It would be correct to say that South American Spanish generally uses "ustedes" instead of "vosotros". Also, I very strongly suspect you can skip the "generally" there, since "vosotros" is in pretty much universal use in Spain. Edited by Hencke on 24 January 2006 at 1:48pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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