Hello everybody and Happy New Year!
Since days ago I was following closely the post exchange concerning the
iberic tongues (portuguese, spanish, catalan). Now, I want to add some
comments to stretch our groups ideas.
Latin American Spanish is one interesting matter to develop studies on
dialectology. If you choose one country you would find several or many
different dialects, being different each other from phonology up to syntax.
Especially you will find semantical variants on words and even on idioms.
These phaenomena are the raw material to make a lot of humouristic
compositions; for example, Venezuela has 5 great dialectoid areas. People of
the central area, makes jokes of the other people's way-to-speak. We are
also acquainted with confussions of common terms, which have been used with
different meanings by different people.
The traditional conception that latin american spanish is derived from
andalusian dialect is misleading. I have observed differences on area
dialectoids which can be only explain as coming from different sources. In
general, andean dialectoids come from north castilian dialect; substrata of
amerindian origin is effecting mainly in lexicon though there is some other
facts on Peruvian and Mexican highlands spanish. It is surely due to the
Quechua (Inca) and Nahuatl (Aztec) substrata respectively.
In the caribbean coastal regions, andalusian dialect is the source for sure.
Nevertheless, one can see that the educated people speech in colonial cities
is strongly influenced by castilian too. This is probably due of
sociolinguistic factors.
There is also the trend of making the capital-city-dialectoid as a national
dialectoid. Thus, I can hear one guy from Buenos Aires and relate his speech
with Argentinian common dialectoid. National variations in Argentina, are
non-perceivable for me, for example.
Nowadays, the trend of splitting the common language in several
proto-tongues is stopped by commercial and communicational exchange; but
there are still country-local variations even in naming the letters. Just
imagine that in Venezuela's new constitution, our official language is named
"Castellano" (i.e. "Castilian") and our sister Colombia calls it "Espa�ol"
(Spanish).
I believe in the future there will be a crusade of standardisation of all
latin american varieties of Spanish.
>From: "David James" <david@...>
>Reply-To: cybalist@egroups.com
>To: cybalist@eGroups.com
>Subject: [cybalist] Spanish and Portuguese in Latin America
>Date: Tue, 04 Jan 2000 15:42:28 -0800
>
>Firstly thank you for all the interesting posts regarding the
>relationship between Spanish, Galician and Portuguese. Keep them coming.
>If I may I would like to learn something enquire about the
>pronunciation of Spanish and Portuguese in Latin America. I believe
>that the dominant dialect of Spanish spoken in Latin America derives
>from the dialect of Andalucia, especially Sevilla from where many of
>the early European migrants came. This dialect has been modified to
>some extent as it has been adopted by the indigenous population and, in
>places, by African slaves.
>I am aware that Brazilian Portuguese is also a distinct dialect that
>differs in pronunciation, vocabulary, and occasionally grammar from the
>language of Portugal. Does Brazilian Portuguese also have a base in a
>regional Portuguese dialect or is it purely a product of its isolation
>from the motherland?
>
>
> Thanks. David James
>
>
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