Happy February!
Well, if you are reading the article today, this means that you made it through the first month of the year, hopefully with relatively few scars. Now only 334 days left until January approaches again.
So since it is the first day of February, the month of San Valentin and love and still a month of happy , albeit, often complicated vacation time here, today's thoughts will be rather of a linguisitc nature about the idiosyncrasies of our beloved Argentina.
As I hope that you all know, Spanish or as we call call it here, castellano, is the lingua franca of the country as well as of the rest of the continent with the exception of our huge neighbor to the north, Brazil , where Portuguese is spoken by nearly 200 million people and the three small Guyanas at the very tip of South America, recently visited in depth by your humble blogger in 2010, whose official tongues are still those of their colonizers, the English, Dutch and French.
Spanish is spoken by approxiamately 400 million people as a first and official language in 21 countries throughout North, Central and South America as well as in Africa; in the United States, it is estimated that there are some 35 million who also speak it as a first language and in many cases as their daily and often only language. That means that writings by Borges and Neruda, songs by Julio Iglesias and Ricky Martin and telenovelas (soap operas) seen on Univision are all major players of this soon to be 2nd most spoken language in the world as a mother tongue.
Argentina is a special case in its development of the language and I WILL get there!
It is a known historical fact that during the golden years of Spain starting in the late 15th century ,Christopher Colombus sailed for Spain looking for a shorter route to the Indies which is present day South-East Asia including the Philippines and the Malay peninsula.
As we all know, instead of finding the spices so sought after in Europe of the time, he reached the shores of the Americas setting foot on what is today's Bahamas, Cuba and Domnican Republic and thus is popularly known as the man who discovered America. This "fact" can of course be disputed with the claim going to various Asian discoverers and the Norse explorer, Leif Erikson, but the "fact "is that "America" had long been populated and traveled by indigenous inhabitants for many centuries before the white man reached its shores.
But Mother Spain got its greedy "foot in the door" through conquering and "civilizing" with religion and customs as remote and ridiculous to the natives of the time as if Amazonians would come to New York or Paris today barefoot with painted faces, carrying bows and arrows while telling us to worship the trees! But the Spanish had their guns and ammunitions and the colonizers from the "madre patria" as did many other European "civilized" conquerors in various parts of the world, thus, setting claim to the new territories. And the language of these colonizing forces was to be the language spoken.
Spanish became the language of this new region now known as Argentina and with the centuries to come, more and more people, both local-born natives and new arrivals from Spain, spoke it as the only acceptable means of verbal communication. However, this Iberian way of speaking changed here due to the massive immigration of mostly Italian arriving men and later women with children searching for a better life.
Italians in large numbers began to arrive in the 1850s reaching the highest numbers from 1901 to 1910 at nearly 1 million and while the numbers never topped those of the begining of the new century, they continued to be very significant and outnumbered any new arrivals from other countries including Spain. And while all were "Italians", they came from various regions of the old country speaking distinctly different dialects, a reason for which Italian, as it is now studied as a language, never took root since the northerners couldn't understand those from the less fortunate areas of the south and Sicily. And since Spanish was not such a complicated task for these latin-speaking newcomers, it was learned and thus spoken at various levels realtively quickly. But words and intonations did make their mark in our castellano rioplatense, the Spanish spoken here especially in the areas not far from the immigrants' mecca, Buenos Aires, and extending itself to neighboring Uruguay as well to nearby provinces. Many non Spanish-speaking people (and obviously also not speaker's of Dante's allegorcal language) ask me if I am speaking Italian when they hear me converse with a fellow Argentine. Perhaps its the gesture of hands flying through the air; or maybe interjections of words such as parla, laburo or manya? It could also be attributed to the intonations that the Italian speakers brought with them which give us a very unique way of oral expression. And our friends from the land of pasta and pizza didn't stop there; they also gave us other influences not as desired as cuisine, cinema or art which often make it hard to differentiate la bella Italia and its Berlusconi comedia dell'arte from Tangolandia's travesties when one recently arrives in Naples, Rome, Buenos Aires or Rosario.
When a Portuguese or Italian-speaking visitor arrives for the first time in Buenos Aires, they often think they understand what is being said but in fact do not. This happened to me in my first year after having emigrated to the Czech Republic. As I had spent nearly 3 years in the very gray and oppresive Poland under the martial law communist regime of Wojciech Jaruzelski, I arrived in my new homeland with a slavic language knowledge and background being able to get around and communicate with relative ease( although generally speaking, the Poles are not very well liked in the "land of 1000 smiles", but who is liked there anyway?)This false comfort got me into many lingusitic troubles and embarassing situations about which you'll read later in the second half of the year when I return to Prague, so stay tuned! But back here in Argentina, even a native Spanish-speaker or anyone fluent in the language arriving for the first time in Buenos Aires often thinks they understand what has been said but indeed does not and many a blank look can be seen on their faces.
As in every country and in every language, the language here is often not spoken as it would be desired by the official language academies whose task it is to set the standards of the proper way to speak and write. In our case, it is the Real Academia Espanola. Sorry, I can't put for some reason the ~ over the n is Espanola.
Here, we conjugate some of verbs in a totally different way than other countries; we don't use the informal "tu" which is "you" in the familiar form but rather we use "vos"; the formal "you' remains 'Usted" as in all countries of habla hispana. If you are lost to what I am saying, it's time to wish you had either taken a foreign language( and remembered it) or falsely be happy that in English this difference doesn't exist. And we use lots of slang and throw in those Italian words. We also shorten words and names to a great extent:
Guillermo is Guille; Alberto is Beto, Francisco is Pancho and so on. Mas o menos(more or less) is maso; compu is computadora,etc.And we also love to use adjectives instead of calling the person by his or her name. Thus a blond, blue-eyed 300 lb.(136 kilos)person can be called by many as "negrito" or "negrita" which means little black boy or girl and an almost anorexic person can be known as "gorda,gordo or gordi"which means" fatty". Me with my 110 kilos...no you figure that one out in pounds!.. I can be called "gordo" by my friend seated next to me but "flaco" or "skinny" by the driver on the same bus.
SES, does that mean that fat is thin and black is white? Well, yes and we can quote reliable sources like Cristina, the mother of all Argentines. In all of her speeches, she says one thing, means another and eventually does nothing.
It's time to go,che! I have such a fiacca after writing this today. Time to get some morfi and a chupi.
And to leave you with a very unqiue way of saying good bye or adios (also a word not used very often here) which is said not on the shores of the River Plate here in BA but rather on the banks of the Danube River or in the Puszta of Hungary,... HALLO!!! Well, there you go! I guess we do have more influence than we think when in far-distance Budapest "hallo" means goodbye. It makes sense to me and I'm sure to a lot of our men and women in power and without a doubt to Cristina! Maybe she said it first!
So... Hallo!
SES
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