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Percentage of Rhotic and Non-Rhotic speakers?
Latin American Spanish is different from European Spanish in accent and vocabulary, although it's apparently like English -- while people sound different, the standard forms are pretty similar between countries, except for the lack of the vos verb form in the new world (I know when I took Spanish in school, they mentioned that it existed, but never bothered to teach it to us). With only a couple years of half-remembered high school Spanish, I'm certainly not qualified to say much more, but the people in this discussion can shed some light on the subject:
http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=21716
There are unique dialects within the US as well, owing to 4 centuries of isolation from Spain and also from variations brought over from Spain (not unlike the many English dialects that contributed to early American colonial speech):
From http://www.pbs.org/speak/seatosea/americanvarieties/spanglish/usa/
"For instance, linguists have identified a number of unique Spanish dialects within the United States, each with core features traceable to 16th- and 17th-century Spain. In the evolution of Spanish, many monophthongs (single vowel sounds) underwent a process of diphthongization, which combines two vowel sounds into one vocalic segment. The Spanish of Colorado, for example, exhibits forms with the earlier, monophthongal vowels instead of the later diphthongal developments. Many words that begin with /h/ in Spanish (hijo, “son”) began with /f/ in Latin. As Spanish evolved, the /f/ slowly changed to /h/, passing through several intermediary stages in the process. Many lexical items in Coloradan Spanish that would be /h/-initial in other varieties of Spanish still exhibit some of the intermediary stages in the evolution of this development.
Other Spanish varieties in the United States (New Mexican, Arizonan, New Mexican, Texan, etc.) that evolved independently of Spanish on the Iberian Peninsula and in Latin America show other dialect features, such as the reduction of consonant clusters (bsà s; ptà t, etc.) and the aspiration of word final /s/ (vamoh for vamos). Additionally, varieties of Spanish in the United States are distinctive because of their unique contact situations with various Native American languages. Some words were borrowed into Spanish from indigenous languages in the Southwest, though these contributions are generally regarded as relatively slight."
There are also borrowings from English like carro for car (instead of coche) and troca for pickup truck (instead of camioneta). S-dropping is common in places, but you never hear the Castilian lisp. I know that some very archaic terms still survive in parts of northen New Mexico that have disappeared from most other modern Spanish varieties, because people from there have told me about them.
Sorry that link didn't work for you, Happy. Try searching Youtube for "Las Cruces Alamogordo Memories" and see what you get.
Damian- as to your New Mexican in Spain, yes, I believe he/she would encounter many problems, more if the person learned Spanish on the streets and less if the person learned Spanish in a more scholastic setting. Mexican Spanish (which is likely what the street learner knows) varies greatly from Spanish Spanish (which is likely what the book learner knows).
Having lived in So. California and attended a schools that were less than 30% white, I used to know a great deal of Spanish. Unfortunately, that's all lost somewhere in the dark recesses of my mind, but I do recall that the Spanish I learned in those formative years of k-8 didn't help me at all in High School language courses.
Tea break time in London....
To my two American lady respondents above - very many thanks. Please give me a wee bit of time to digest all the interesting and absorbing info you passed on and I will comment further some time soon when Great God Time itself permits. Isn't it a pain how it governs all our lives so much.....
On another topic, which has nothing to do with you two ladies, I do wish something could be done about all those two word B...F... obscenities ruining so many of these otherwise decent threads. As the inimitable Georgie Pilson* constantly says each time he gets irritated....."How tarsome it all is....!" He meant "tiresome" but as Georgie boy was mega posh, not to mention delighfully effete, his tiresome always came out as tarsome....here he is in person in this cameo clip featuring many of the scenes from the BBC TV series recently shown on one of the other channels which I made a point of watching......the English are brilliant when it comes to "high camp". Georgie's "perfect" is always "parfect".
I so love the English in many ways, and quite honestly I think that only the English could produce a TV series such as "Mapp and Lucia"**, based on the books of E F Benson and set mainly in a small fictional town in East Sussex, England, in the early 1930s called Tilling, but actually modelled on an actual town in East Sussex called Rye where the entire show was filmed 25 years ago, and where Benson was twice mayor in the late 1930s just prior to his rather premature death in February 1940. In August of that year much of his former home in Rye was destroyed in an enemy air raid.
*Elizabeth Mapp and Emmeline Lucas, known to all as Lucia (pronounced the Italian way, naturally.
Both Lucia and Georgie frequently spoke to each other in a form of very camp and affected and very broken Italian....using expressions like "un po di musica" and "molto bello", along with many more like that, saying things no real self respecting Italian would ever utter in a million years. And everyone in this town of Tilling would emit the valediction " au reservoir" instead of the French "au revoir". It really is the type of scenario only the English could produce in that manner and style. ;-)
Here you will hear Georgie say "tarsome" in this cameo type clip showing a whole array of scenes from the series....it has obviously been tampered with as the YT clip looks like it's being shown through a keyhole and is quite dark in places, nothing like it is on the TV screen.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OU8ysRWwYmE&feature=PlayList&p=3F4F480CA9905B48&index=15
What has all this to do with New Mexican Spanish versus Spanish Spanish? Nothing much at all really - more about that important issue later....I just wanted to get Tarsome Georgie off my chest for now......
New Mexico - Alamogordo, Las Cruces...Memories
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yTP2ud1FS8
Everything is working fine now.
I recently went to Barcelona, which was great, and sometime ago on on a rather dull holiday to the Costa del Sol, I borrowed the car and went into the mountains to Ronda. (Partly because the name reminded me of the Rhondda Valley in Wales.)
Ronda - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
19 Aug 2009 ... Orson Welles said he was inspired by his frequent trips to Spain and Ronda (e.g. Wells unfinished film about Don Quixote). ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronda - Cached - Similar
The History of the Rhondda Valleys
The cruel history of the Rhondda Valleys in Glamorgan, South Wales.
www.anglesey.info/Rhondda_History.htm - Cached - Similar
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I heard the joke about 'adverbs' at the end of the Proms, and I could not quite understand it. It seemed to be about the difference between holding on 'tight' and holding on 'tightly'. I suspect Londoners' say, "Hold on tight!"
Possibly someone could correct me in a nice way. I appreciated Damian's article on 'towns with names that end in -wich'.
I'm happy to know of your "--wich" appreciation, Happy Chappy. There are even more, less well known, "wiches" dotted around the map of this country.
Are you related to Happy Clappy by any chance? I quite like happy clappy hymns in church, unlike the old die hard traditionalists....they have some zip to them - the hymns, not the trads. One of my faves is Give Me Joy in My Heart, Give me Sunshine.......or more often it's Give Me Oil in My Lamp.....as sung by these guys at the Greenbelt Beer Festival in the wee village of Kemsworth, in Bedfordshire, England:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_IGx_X2LI0&feature=related
As you no doubt know David Robertson, the American conductor, was referring to the less use of the "---ly" ending in the USA compared with over here, although as you so rightly say, Brits would definitely choose to say "Hold on tight!" instead of "tightly". An old song about the famous conductor on his "big six wheeler, scarlet plated, diesel engined, London Transport, forty seven horse power omnibus" had him yelling out to his passengers: "Hold very tight, please!" as the bus turned the corner out of the Aldwych* and into the Strand.
*Aldwych, on which the BBC World Service studios and offices are located - a semi-circular shaped street in Central London....notice the "-wych" ending, the same derivative.
Back to Elizabeth Mapp and Emmeline Lucas, and old Georgie boy.....in this clip they have all gone bicycle mad....towards the end of this YT clip you will see the ever fur coated Mrs Wyse sedately cycling along at a snail's pace while her chauffeur trots along behind, holding up her coat like he would the train of a gown...they turn the corner and up along a short street leading up to the church. On the right hand side of the street you will see a black fronted building - it is still there today just as in the clip...it's called Fletcher's Tea Rooms.
All the filming for the Mapp and Lucia TV series was done at Rye, in East Sussex, England. When some friends and passed through Rye, on our way back from a long weekend on the Continent recently, we went into Fletcher's and had a fantastic tea each, consisting of a whopping great sandwich of the kind of bread of your choice along with the filling of your choice (mine was smoked salmon and salad); a huge fruit scone with butter and freshly made strawberry jam and whipped cream; a huge chunk of the cake of your choice (mine was iced walnut cake and cream) and of course a pot of tea each....all for £9.95 per head.
As the series was set in the early 1930s the divide between the social classes in England was quite enormous....notice how Lucia got her poor old chauffeur Cadman to pay those sums of money to the roadside labourers each time she demolished that very flimsy looking tent of theirs....half a crown a time (the old UK money which was replaced by our present system in 1971). By my reckoning, with the aid of a reference book, half a crown (two shillings and six pence) equates to just over 12p in our money today. Poor old Georgie got nobbled for "five bob" though - double the rate Lucia paid - a very shrewd businessman labourere - "five bob" being old time slang for five shillings, exactly 25p in present day UK currency.. eventually to be replaced by the € (the Euro) which is currently rocketing in value.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJIbo-6a84U&feature=related
<<I heard the joke about 'adverbs' at the end of the Proms, and I could not quite understand it. It seemed to be about the difference between holding on 'tight' and holding on 'tightly'. I suspect Londoners' say, "Hold on tight!"
Possibly someone could correct me in a nice way.>>
Americans have a strong tendency drop the -ly suffix from adverbs. To us this makes no semantic difference at all -- we still mean them as adverbs -- but to the rest of the world, we've just turned the word into an adjective and I imagine it sounds odd. We however, don't notice any difference between "You'd better get here quick!" and "You'd better get here quickly!"
Naturally enough Uriel (and other normal, decent Antimooners) will realise that the last posting was not perpetrated by me - I am the real me, and not the masquerading odiously vile impostor above.
How I wish we had a system of idiot proof Username-cum-Password signing in procedures in this otherwise fun Forum, but we've been down this road loads of times in here, have we not?
I wish we could get rid of these muppets real quick! ;-)
<<I wish we could get rid of these muppets real quick! ;-)>>
Damien calling someone a muppet! Oh the irony!
Who is Damien then? Why do you persist in repeating yourself, mate?
Anyway....let's get on with business in hand and head for slappy wristy time for DamiAn.....
I messed up big time! oops....let me put the record straight here.
First of all it wasn't Kemsworth, Bedfordshire - there is no such place it seems....I meant Kensworth, Bedfordshire....that's where they have a beer festival...it's very close to Whipsnade Zoo, not that that is relevant to this issue.
http://www.parishlink.org/
And Greenbelt has nothing to do with beer festivals at all....in fact it is an organisation for young people in the UK focusing on basic Christian based ideals, but bearing little resemblance to most of the more extreme, more politicised right wing American equivalents.
It just so happens that all those people pictured in the YT clip were clutching glasses of beer, as all in all there is a different attitude to alcohol in the UK (and Europe generally) than there is in the USA, it seems.
In the UK you will discover that many churches are located not too far distant from a pub....visit any Englsh village, especially, and you will see what I mean......the local village Parish Church of St Michael and All Angels, for example, is most probably just a few paces away from the Farmers' Arms or the Golden Pheasant Inn, and it's not at all unusual for the dog-collared Vicar to have a noggin of ale alongside his parishioners in the lounge, or even the public bar of the nearby pub on a Sunday lunchtime following the morning service.
And all those people signing "Give Me Joy in my Heart, give me Praises, give me Joy in My Heart, I pray!" - followed by all those "Sing Hosannas!" -were in a tent on the racecourse at Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, England, during the Greenbelt Festival......quite a long way from the aforementioned Kensworth.
http://www.greenbelt.org.uk/about/history
noggin
Noggin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
29 May 2009 ... Noggin the Nog, a popular British children's television series shown by the BBC in the United Kingdom from 1959 to 1965. ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noggin - Cached - Similar
Noggin the Nog - Noggin and the Pie - Part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTcStBUW2Ao
CAPTAIN PUGWASH AND THE ISLAND OF THE DODOS
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnipHUBRMfU
Noggin:
nog·gin (ngn)
n.
1. A small mug or cup.
2. A unit of liquid measure equal to one quarter of a pint.
firkin
butt
kinderkin
hogshead
A glossary of terms (Spirits)
Toddy: Fermented beverage made from rice with molasses or palm sap.
http://www.tastersguildorlando.com/documents/spiritsglossary.html
I have remembered the term I was looking for 'Gill'. This used to be commonly used for a single measure of spirits.
"In Great Britain, the standard single measure of spirits in a pub was 1/6 gill (23.7 ml) in England, and 1/5 gill (28.4 ml) in Scotland; though this has now been replaced by either 25 ml or 35 ml measures (Landlords can choose which one to serve)."
"In southern England it is also called a noggin, but in northern England the large noggin is used, which is two gills. In some areas, a gill came to mean half a pint for both beer and milk."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gill_(volume)
I am sure that many people will disagree with the above definition of a 'Toddy'.
<<I heard the joke about 'adverbs' at the end of the Proms, and I could not quite understand it. It seemed to be about the difference between holding on 'tight' and holding on 'tightly'. I suspect Londoners' say, "Hold on tight!"
Possibly someone could correct me in a nice way.>>
At one time British people were accused of saying things like:
"That was awfully good of you"
Or
"What a frightfully wet day it has been"
Do you think that is what he could have been referring too?
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Tiffin: is another nice old fashioned word.
Apparently all you need to do to rid yourself of the rhotics and go all non-rhotics* is to sup a cup of tea.....at least that's what this American lad says. He also says that you need to scoff a wee bit of haggis in order to speak the way I personally do....well, what a revelation that one is!
I haven't eaten so much as a tiny morsel of haggis since last Burn's Night yet it hasn't affected my accent one teensy weensy bit - it's still wowing some of the people down here in London...I say "some" as accents don't really cause any kind of stir in London whatsoever - this metropolis is a veritable hotchpotch of accents from all over the globe and everyone is used to hearing so many different sorts.
Of course this lad is jesting - Brits do love their tea by and large - actually during the average day I slurp more coffee than I do tea, to be honest with you but I do admit to starting each day with a bloody great mug of hot steaming Tetlley's special brew tea - so strong that the spoon stands upright in the mug and if you leave it in there long enough it will start to corrode.
What this American lad omits to tell you all is that if you sip a cup of Earl Grey you immediately start to speak like a refined lady from Tunbridge Wells, even if you're a bloke. On the other hand a couple of slurps of PG Tips and you sound like you've never left Wigan or Wakefield in your entire life. Half a haggis and you can fool even a hard boiled Glaswegian that you're native East Kilbride or Rutherglen born and bred, and if you wash down the haggis with a Bellhaven or two plus a whisky chaser then you're the truest of the true sons (or daughters) of Alba.
The American guy does try his best, bless him - but he'd be really, really hard pressed to fool any Brit into thinking he was one of us by the way he speaks.....no way, Jose....never in this world! Good effort though...but he wasn't really trying too hard was he? Just a wee bit of fun....
I'm just wondering this though.....why would any American even want to sound like a Brit anyway? I know Gwyneth Paltrow and Annette Bening, for instance, do a pretty good job in this direction but they get paid to do it as part of their job. Madonna was rubbish at it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNdty6PADno
*Of course a fair number of British accents are quite rhotic to begin with anyway. Good night.
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