[lit-ideas] Re: Are they synonymous?
- From: David Ritchie <ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 27 Jan 2007 23:12:16 -0800
On Jan 27, 2007, at 5:43 PM, Andreas Ramos wrote:
But speaking Spanish doesn't mean you can talk with any Latino. Often,
I barely understand Mexicans. They use so much slang. I've watched
Argentinian movies and I miss perhaps half of it, due to local slang.
Colombians seem to speak entirely in slang. One of the things that
really surprised me is that Spaniards generally don't speak Spanish.
Only Madrileños speak Castellano. Everyone else speaks the local
dialects of their province, such as Catalan. Those are difficult to
understand in spoken conversation.
If you speak either Danish, you can understand Norwegian and Swedish.
Amusingly, Norwegians and Swedes can't understand Danish
pronunciation. They are really annoyed by the refusal of Danes to
speak properly.
Given the history of languages, dialects and identities, should we be
surprised? I imagine (I only know a little of the academic literature
on the subject) American English to be unusual among world languages, a
truly national and quite democratic--by which I mean no academy or
brahmin class controls it-- version of Hoch Deutsch, a language
everyone more or less understands and has done so for some considerable
time. In other parts of the world, what you say and how you say it are
greater declarations of allegiance than is the case here.
David Ritchie,
making it up as he goes along in
Portland, Oregon
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