an open letter to my neighbors

[summerless_year]

Queridos vecinos del dpto. 505,

Si bien se están preguntando qué  demonios estoy haciendo aquí en el 605, porque les tinka que estoy arrastrando, pieza por pieza, cada mueble que tengo en el departamento desde un lado al otro, pues... Efectivamente eso es lo que estoy haciendo. Pieza por pieza. Cada mueble. La cama, los estantes, los veladores, la

Comments

[ti_ana]

That's good, actually. I wouldn't say "qué en demonios", though, I'd just say "qué demonios". Y lo de "tinka" es nuevo para mí. ¿Es un "chilenismo"? (Por cierto, a mí me encanta aprender estas palabritas dialectales de toda Latino América.)

[summerless_year]

qué demonios it is . I shall change it. Tinka es un chilenismo. Vamos al cine, te tinka? Te tinka venir a mi casa? Me tinka que ella es de otro lugar. I think of it as "wanna, feel like, and I guess."

And I said cachitos because they're not braids, just pigtails. (I said cachtitos, but that was a typo). I guess it means like "little horns." Sometimes they're braided, sometimes not.

And thanks for the vote of confidence. Written Spanish is not really my forté. Especially since it stays still and just hangs there, for all the grammatical errors to be observed! Strangely, messenger has been helpful in getting over my fear of writing in Spanish.

[ti_ana]

I have a Chilean friend here (well, Chilean-Korean) who says "¿chacha?" a lot at the end of sentences. By the context, I managed to infer that it meant something like "¿verdad?" or "¿no?", which I think was pretty close. She said it means something like "¿entiendes?". So I thought that was neat. Also an Argentine friend was using a different word for gasoline... actually, she used a whole different phrase than I did for "to put gas in the car". I remember she used the verb "cargar", but she didn't say "gasolina" and for the life of me, now I can't remember what it was. Anyway, it was fascinating. [/dork]

Oh, and that's interesting, about being afraid of writing in Spanish. I'm just the opposite with Italian. I feel much more comfortable writing in Italian than speaking it. It's something I've been working on for the past 6 or 7 months or so, but I'm still not where I want to be!

[summerless_year]

it's usually cachai, which is our funny little pretend voseo second person ending. For familiarity and informality

[ti_ana]

LOL @ the reggaeton thing. I can't believe how far that song has gone. :-P The word my friend used was something with an "n", I think. It was strange. I didn't catch what she was saying at first, until something about the context put it into perspective suddenly. I made a mental note of it to write it down when I got home, but I got home several hours after that, so by that time, I'd already forgotten the word. Ah well.

Oh, hey, as long as I have you here, you might be able to give me a hand with a paper I'm writing. It's about racial slurs in different Spanish speaking countries. I don't have much from Chile, and since you're there right now, you might know. Can you think of any words you've heard in Spanish that they use in Chile to refer to people of different "races" or ethnicities? For example, Amerindians, black people, white people, Asians, people of mixed races, etc. Also, how would you define the word "trigueño", based on the way you might have heard it used over there?

[summerless_year]

Hmmmm

[ti_ana]

That's all quite interesting. Especially on the issue of black people. My professor asked one Argentine woman in my class if there are black people in Argentina and she basically said no. Obviously, that doesn't meant that there aren't any, but it just means that there are fewer in comparison to other Latin American countries. I find it interesting because people in the US have a stereotype about all Latin Americans being dark skinned, when in reality, there are so many that look very white. The info about most of them being from Brazil is very relevant to the subject of my class, I'm definitely using that. Thanks for the info! And if diabla_traviesa has some free time, maybe she can wander in here and add anything relevant

[wickedeyes]

Do you mean "huevear"? It's funny: I used that verb with a Mexican friend of mine and he says it means something completely different than our usage. I guess the word "huevon" is Mexican slang for someone who is lazy. I've heard it in a couple of Molotov songs as well.

Another expression that I really like is "la cago" (accent on the o, I can't figure it out on this laptop). When I felt comfortable enough using it, I usually got a lot of laughs. :/ I think there are just some expressions and words that I can't get away with saying.... it just sounds too weird to them.

[summerless_year]

and la cagó can mean it's great, or it royally sucks! I heart it! That one people let me say. I haven't found too many they won't let me say, actually.

[ti_ana]

Haha... "la cagó" in PR means that someone totally fucked something up.

[summerless_year]

también... Pero al ver la luna llena una noche despejada, se puede decir... viste la luna? la cagó. Like "it's so fucking cool"

[summerless_year]

and also, if you want to set your teeth completely on edge, go to redprociclista.cl to the forum section. you will see a lot of tinka, cleta and weon there. And frightening spelling. It's a bike forum I occasionally visit to see what people are up to. It is veguely legible to a nonspeaker of Chilean, I think. There's a book called "how to survive in the Chilean jungle" which has a lot of Chilean slang, but you're unlikely to come into contact with most of it through Chileans who live outside of Chile, I think. Tinka is pretty universal throughout the classes, I think.

[ti_ana]

Yeah, sometimes I'm looking at stuff on youtube in Spanish and the comments are so riddled with abbreviations and spelling errors, that they're almost completely incomprehensible. Puerto Rican slang and netspeak are also pretty hard to understand more often than not. I don't think it's just PRs who do this online, but they're just the ones I've seen do it the most... but I hate it when they replace the "c" with a "k". I don't understand what the point is. I understand abbreviations because they make the word shorter, thus typing is faster, but exchanging a "c" and a "k" is pointless... if anything, it makes it more difficult. An example of this that I see a lot is "loka, km estas?" (for "loca, ¿como estás?", where "loca/o" is just slang for "chica/o", basically). Sometimes I'll see it for the "qu" sound as well: "k kieres hacer?" (for "¿qué quieres hacer?").

It'd be interesting if somebody made a linguistic investigation about Spanish netspeak.

[summerless_year]

oooh! Let's write the paper together!

hides back in academic obscurity... Actually what interests me the most at the moment is code switching and relexifying among bilingual English speakers. Nos da la tremenda lata tener que hablar en ingles entre nosotros. And when a monolingual English speaker is around, nos complica la vida! Or at least, the conversation. And none of us are native speakers. Some things are just so much clearer or more economical in Spanish. I should keep track of when I do it.

I know menospreciar, perjudicar, tener ganas and me da flojera are some that are much more economical to me in Spanish.

[ti_ana]

I would totally do it, actually. As soon as I wrote the comment, the thought popped into my head that if I ever went for the PhD in linguistics that I was considering, I'd consider a topic related to that. It's a relatively new phenomenon, so I'd imagine there's not too much on that yet