How to learn Rioplatense Spanish

Kōtiro Karu Kākāriki

So you want to go to Argentina or Uruguay? Or maybe you have a partner or friend from there and would love to speak a little more porteño? When I first started learning Spanish it seemed so difficult to differentiate the dialects, and the Argentine one is one of the more different. A lot of resources focussed on more general Latin American Spanish, or Castillian Spanish. I didn’t know if it was possible to speak with an Argentine accent without visiting the country. However, it can be done!

My main method was to acquire an Argentine husband 😛 But I understand not everyone is able to take this route! It would be very helpful if you could find an Argentine or Uruguayan in real life or on Skype to talk to, but otherwise media from those countries will be key. I learnt my accent without ever going to Argentina, and…

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หลักเกณฑ์การทับศัพท์ภาษาโปรตุเกส

“จง​ขอ​เถิด แล้ว​ท่าน​จะ​ได้​รับ จง​แสวงหา​เถิด แล้ว​ท่าน​จะ​พบ จง​เคาะ​ประตู​เถิด แล้ว​เขา​จะ​เปิด​ประตู​รับ​ท่าน เพราะ​คน​ที่​ขอ​ย่อม​ได้​รับ คน​ที่​แสวงหา​ย่อม​พบ คน​ที่​เคาะ​ประตู​ย่อม​มี​ผู้​เปิด​ประตู​ให้”

Mt 7:7–8

To my surprise, I’ve found out that the Royal Institute of Thailand has actually issued rules for the transliteration of foreign words into Thai! From all I’ve read about them, I should actually be surprised I didn’t think of looking it up before.

From what I can gather, and just as I’d imagined, they’ve come up with systems that attempt to reflect as much of the phonology of the original languages and yet represent as much of the original orthographic features and idiosyncrasies by the Thai script.

The languages whose standards have been published seem to be:

• Arabic;
• Chinese;
• English;
• French;
• German;
• Hindi;
• Italian;
• Japanese;
• Korean;
• Malay;
• Russian;
• Spanish;
• Vietnamese.

That means that, contrarily to what the title of this post says, there doesn’t seem to be an official system for Portuguese.

For many features of Portuguese, I could actually come up with a reasonable basic system derived from common rules taken from the published standards that would also be valid for Portuguese – the representation of /ʒ/ by ฌ, for instance; for others, however, I wouldn’t be able to trace any parallels at all and would have to rely on examples found online and, well, my own whim – such as how to deal with unique sounds or raised (neutralised) unstressed vowels (to represent phonology or to reflect orthography?).

Marasmo

So much linguistic apathy and stagnation in my life right now, and I’m not used to it at all. The thing, however, is that ‘real life’, so to speak, is taking a heavy toll on me versus languages these days – even though I’m also to blame for being so bad at organising myself any efficiently.

It’s been basically me and Polish for a while now. But gosh, do I miss Arabic! And Japanese! And German! And the step-by-step movement away from Portuñol towards Rioplatense Spanish! And the never-ending task of consciously polishing my British-oriented English! And French! And Italian!

Not that I’m not tempted by other languages that have always appealed to me – from Thai and Swahili to Hungarian and Welsh, with even Faroese and Old Tupi sprinkled somewhere in between –, but I had to learn how to be practical and realistic at some point. Having lost all my digital language materials when my HDD was fried by lightning / a power surge (and I had no useful recent backup whatsoever) did certainly help with that.

There are also the languages I used to love deeply, but that for this or that reason have lost the appeal they once held, the prime examples being Greek, Persian and Vietnamese.

And last but not least, there’s Bulgarian forever skulking below the surface – a language that I’ve loved from day one, so many years ago, even when it was absolutely impossible for me to even think about it, but that I’ve possibly mistreated all along.

Ice, ice, baby!

That awkward moment of anxiety when you just can’t remember a word you should know and there’s no cognate that can save you! I just couldn’t for the sake of me remember how to say ‘ice’ in French; I knew it wasn’t a cognate to Portuguese gelo (or to Spanish hielo, for that matter), but I couldn’t remember the Italian word either, and that I did guess was a cognate to the French word! What a bummer… The obvious (but disappointing) solution was to look it up after all – French glace and Italian ghiaccio.

The Italian and the French words derive from Latin glacies (‘ice’), while the Portuguese and the Spanish words come from Latin gelu (‘frost’, ‘chill’); both, however, are ultimately derived from Proto-Indo-European *gel- (‘cold’).

By the way, French has gel and Italian has gelo, but the meaning is still the same as in Latin.

Toading about

Oh, and my passion for etymology leads to interesting results…

I was reading about the Portuguese word for toad, sapo, and found out its exact origin is unknown, but it’s believed to be a word of pre-Roman origin, probably from an original Iberian language. I didn’t expect that.

It’s also sapo in Galician and Spanish, but, once you go east and cross to Catalan and French, it changes to gripau and crapaud, respectively. And it seems the Basque word is apo.

Curiously, it seems the very origins of gripau, crapaud, and even ‘toad’ itself, are also disputed.

What a curious animal!

猿

I love etymology, so it’s always fun to learn something new about some words. I’d always assumed Portuguese macaco and English ‘macaque’ had a common source, but it turns out that the English word is a borrowing (via French macaque) from Portuguese itself; it seems even Spanish macaco was borrowed from Portuguese too.

On the other hand, the very etymology of Portuguese macaco is frustrating, because, despite a handful of theories, no one is really sure about its origin… The most widely accepted one seems to derive it from some language spoken in Congo, in which makaku would be the plural of kaku, ‘monkey’, but it’s more of a theory than a fact.

“Com óleo de passiflora” / “Con aceite de passiflora”

⠝⠁⠞⠥⠗⠝
⠍⠝⠍⠜⠑ ⠑ ⠃⠑⠃⠣
⠎⠁⠃⠕⠝⠑⠞⠑
⠚⠁⠃⠬⠝

Juanes

Un corazón que late por vos

Sobrenomes

I wonder how ‘obvious’ it is for people familiar with both Spanish and Portuguese to realise that the family names of Portuguese and Spanish speakers run in reverse — that is, for Portuguese speakers it’s mother’s surname(s) + father’s surname(s), while for Spanish speakers it’s father’s surname(s) + mother’s surname(s). If João Fernandes de Sousa marries Patrícia Rodrigues Ferreira, they may have a son called Henrique Ferreira de Sousa; if Juan Hernández Sosa marries Patricia Rodríguez Herrera, they may have a son called Enrique Hernández Rodríguez.

Sure, the above doesn’t go into all the details of how many (sur)names are possible or usual in different countries, how strictly the order has to be followed, etc.

«Muchas gracias, señor.»

Amazing that, as a good Portuguese speaker, I always get to mix up muy /muj/ and mucho /mutʃo/ when writing in Spanish, even if the distinction is obvious (to say the least). In Portuguese, both translate as muito /mu͠jtu/.

• Está muy frío. = Está muito frio.
• Hace mucho frío. = Faz muito frio.

Although found in Portuguese, mui /mu͠j/ (or /muj/) is rare and subject to regional and/or stylistic variations (though it apparently only occurs indeed before adjectives, adverbs and verbs). It was apparently more common in older stages of the language, though, and I’ll check my books on Old Portuguese for that later.