141–150 of 468 posts
Chile has an Antarctic claim going all the way to the pole. If you consider that, it's impossible to go further south
If you don't, then we still just run out of land in the Continent. Note that the neighbour competition also applies to Tierra del Fuego, as we've had tensions with Argentina through history over the control of Magallanes Channel.
One of the most interesting drives in my life was Chile from the island of Chiloe to the Tatio Geysers in the Atacama. Just so many different climate zones, and all in relatively close proximity. Chiloe and Puerto Montt were damp, cold, and fog-shrouded in Summer (Jan-Feb), very similar to parts of the coastal pacific northwest. The area to its north, centered around the German-influenced town of Valdivia, was Califo…
> Just so many different climate zones, and all in relatively close proximity. Another place like this, perhaps lesser in scale, is the Big Island of Hawaii. Its latitude means the trade winds are blowing from the same direction year-round, bringing moisture to the windward side (e.g. Hilo, HI with 120" average annual rainfall) and leaving the leeward side dry (e.g. Kailua-Kona, HI with under 20" average annual rainf…
When I went to Chile I was about to undertake a cross-country move across the US. Everybody I spoke to in Santiago couldn't imagine a country where you can drive a massive distance like that and move from one major metropolis to another. At the time, I thought they were just reflecting on the fact that Chile is a country where 40% of all people live in one metro area, so there isn't another huge metro area to move to…
The Concepción metro area is 1 million people, Valparaíso/Viña as well. Chileans love to point out that there isn't much outside of Santiago but it's not really true.
See also “chilean empire map” (it’s not serious).
My key takeaway from this article is that the best place to go see the Milky Way is deep in the Amazon rainforest… where the tree cover is nearly 100% and there isn’t a single road for a hundred miles. That’s a neat collection of graphics. I’m curious how bespoke the creation process is for each graphic or if this is something everyone just does in ArcGis or similar. That last graphic about the Western US being the o…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There literally is a standard Spanish, no? I understand it to be based on Castilian. However I understand your point that even within the country of Spain there are many dialects which diverge from "standard".
There's "neutral" spanish, but it's less of a formal standard and more of a rough subset that people recongnize it's generally understandable to most people It being so artificial means that it doesn't fit anywhere, even it if's becoming more common (Kids are growing up listening to Media dubbed to it, so it's not weird seing a Child "speak like a cartoon" for a while until their local dialect kicks in)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I was getting my degree, two of my classmates spoke Spanish as a first language. One was a transfer student from Madrid, and the other was an immigrant from northern Mexico. I was in the room the first time they met and tried speaking Spanish to one another. They couldn't understand each other and communicated solely in English after about 10 minutes.
The funny thing is that both Spaniards and Mexicans claim to use the most neutral spanish, but you'd find their idiosyncrasies rather quickly - spaniards' 'f' sound of the letter S, and the infinite modisms and particular mexican accent on the other hand. As the Spanish empire extended its spread so widely the language grew pretty complex (as english did!) so not even the most "neutral" spanish speaking countries do…
Only informally. Formal Chilean Spanish is probably one of the most understandable ones, accent-wise. (There's still some vocabulary differences)
The article mentions it, but I only learned recently that Bolivia did not used to be landlocked. Chile took Bolivia's coastline somewhat recently (late 1800s/early 1900s). > The dispute began in 1879, when Chile invaded the Antofagasta port city on its northern border with Bolivia as part of a dispute over taxes. Within four years Chileans had redrawn the map of South America by taking almost 50,000 square miles of B…
Disclaimer: I live in Chile, but not a Chilean national(nor of similar ethnicity), and certainly not a historian. The dispute is seen differently in Chile and is not as simplistic as Chile invading a port. In general i've gotten the sense that the general populace believes that Bolivia(with its secret alliance with Peru) had other intentions. >In February 1878, Bolivia increased taxes on the Chilean mining company Co…
On the difference of Chilean Spanish to other "dialects": > It’s the farthest region from Spain, so the least communicated to the rest of the empire, and hence the one that drifted the most from the homeland. Er... if you look at the table ( https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1272,c_limit,f_webp,q_... ), Chile has quite a lot of red, but actually its Spanish is closer to the Spanish from Spain than that of other S…
Chilean Spanish is heavily influenced by Spanish, German, Italian, and Croat immigrants from a pronunciation and colloquialism standpoint because those were the 4 main immigrant communities to Chile. Also, Spain Spanish is not necessarily "Standard" (Castilian) Spanish.