Wednesday 5 August 2009

asturian footnote ...

When we were in Luarca one this I noticed was that whenever I said 'Gracias' in my bad Castilian Spanish - sounding something like 'grathiaaths' they said 'grasiAAS' back to me with the emphasis very much on the last syllable.

I was talking about my vacation trip to some of my team, and mentioned this little peculiarity. One of my team, who is married to a Uruguayan, immediately said 'Oh they say it like that in Montevideo'.

Which is interesting given the migration from Asturias to Argentina and Uruguay in the nineteenth century - I'd always thought the lispless pronounciation (eg sinco not thinco for cinco) in Argentina and Chile an older form left over from the eighteenth century.

(My Spanish can't be that bad - I managed to confuse at least one waiter while ordering some beers and some raciones badly enough with my accent that he started speaking to me in warp factor 9 Spanish - obviously my Spanish was good enough to convince him that I was from somewhere in the diaspora. And waiters are a good choice - they get to hear a lot of accents and are usually pretty good at guessing who needs to be spoken to slowly and who needs to be spoken to in English ...)

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