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New Mexico is losing a form of Spanish spoken nowhere else

nytimes.com

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Re: New Mexico is losing a form of Spanish spoken nowhere else

#111

Post by midoridensha »

deafpolygon wrote: post #89

It's sad, but how many languages have we lost over the centuries? How many variations of Italian or French have we lost due to migration? As a Deaf person, this is readily apparent in local flavors of ASL. I noticed this with deaf people I came into contact with at RIT as a student there. There were many slight variations. You could tell who were new to the school, or those who's been there for a while. The ones new…

>It's sad, but how many languages have we lost over the centuries?

I don't know about languages, but for dialects, I think the answer is the same as the number of people who have died over the centuries.

No one speaks a language exactly like anyone else, so ultimately, every person has a slightly different dialect. There's no way to preserve them all. Your analogy about preserving living trees in a book is apt.

Re: New Mexico is losing a form of Spanish spoken nowhere else

#112

Post by decafninja »

Traveling to Europe for the first time last year, my eyes were opened to how many languages there were that you don’t typically hear about in the mainstream. It surprised me to learn there were other languages in Spain other than Spanish (and that the Latin American dialect had key differences to the European one). Likewise that “Italian” is not the main language spoken by many people in Italy, which apparently has at least a few related but different languages (Neapolitan, Veneto, etc.) in use.

Closer to home, I see my Asian American friends who never grasped the language of their original culture being frustrated that they cannot pass down the language to their kids. A couple we are close with is a Taiwanese husband and Korean wife. The husband knows virtually no Chinese and the wife knows virtually no Korean. They want to teach their son both, but can’t.

I suppose this is the start of the process of how we ended up with the current generations of say, Italian Americans or German Americans or Irish Americans who mostly lost the ability to speak the language of their ancestors several generations ago.

Re: New Mexico is losing a form of Spanish spoken nowhere else

#113

Post by dghughes »

el-salvador wrote: post #39
dghughes wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>words drawn from English and languages indigenous to North America. >thought to be Tlaxcalan Indians, who spoke Náhuatl, the lingua franca of the Aztec Empire. Why would a dialect of Spanish in southern Spain have indigenous native American words?

It is the exception, rather than the rule, but there are two Nahuatl words that have been borrowed widely to other languages. They can be found in a recognizable form even as far away as Finnish, Korean, Indonesian, Japanese and Emoji. Chocolate from Xocolatl Tomato from Tomatl

Ah yes I can see that it makes sense.

But I guess I was under the impression what was meant was a small area of southern Spain and its language was more heavily affected that loanwords. Perhaps structure too not just using words for items that didn't exist in the Old World.

Re: New Mexico is losing a form of Spanish spoken nowhere else

#114

Post by prpl »

salomon812 wrote: post #20
ttfkam wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never heard of Castilian Spanish referred to as "accentless" before. The lisp always sounds odd to me. That and vosotros. The vast majority of Spanish speakers worldwide use neither.

Northern New Mexico uses "vosotros." No one told us not to. (Or so I'm told, see my main comment.)

I actually learned both in high school (Las Cruces) but moved to Utah and dropped vos/vosotros. (grew up in Farmington before that)

Re: New Mexico is losing a form of Spanish spoken nowhere else

#115

Post by prmoustache »

jjav wrote: post #87
marc_abonce wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I only learned about the New Mexico Spanish variant today and my experience is limited to OP's article plus 2 YouTube videos. That being said: I think that if you want to, you could learn "standard" Spanish and still have an understandable conversation with you family. At least for me (I'm Mexican) the people in those videos were easier to understand compared to the average Cuban Spanish, for example, whi…

> [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkEq9OhbbDQ > [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdAGJz4NvAg As a native spanish speaker these are completely understandable, I wouldn't even call them a "different form of Spanish". Sure, they occasionally use a word or structure I wouldn't, but it's all very clear. No more different to my ears than variations in the language from country to country. > average Cuban Spanish, fo…

As a non-native spanish speaker I find it quite easy to understand, no more difficult than my mexican gf grandfather, and much much easier than spanish people from andalusia.

Some examples:

from Granada: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvpHcX2Ksac

from Cadiz (which they really pronounce Ca'i): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRh9OjCW6Y8

Re: New Mexico is losing a form of Spanish spoken nowhere else

#116

Post by dctoedt »

satvikpendem wrote: post #90
SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was having a related discussion with my wife about why our nephews weren’t taught Spanish as a first language (we live in Texas, their dad is bilingual). Frankly, having English as your first language gives you a much higher advantage in life in the current zeitgeist. There’s no incentive to learn RandomLanguage first, but there is every incentive to learn English first.

Nope, learning multiple languages from the beginning has been shown to have many benefits. I speak both my native language and English at native levels, simply because I learned my language at home and English in school. Only teaching English is really a waste when you live in an English speaking country, as the child will automatically pick up English through school and friends.

> Nope, learning multiple languages from the beginning has been shown to have many benefits.

Anecdata: I'm a native English speaker but as a little kid I was completely bilingual in French (dad was a USAF officer stationed at a NATO base in rural France; my sisters and I did our first few years of school in the local village schools). I've long had the impression that native fluency in both languages had benefits; it certainly gave me easy A+ grades in high-school and college French classes, but otherwise I couldn't begin to articulate what those benefits might be.

These days my French is pretty rudimentary, but my wife and I like to watch some English-subtitled French TV series on Netflix and Acorn, e.g., Call My Agent, Candice Renoir, and Munch; it's fun to recognize idioms and sometimes not even need the subtitles.

Re: New Mexico is losing a form of Spanish spoken nowhere else

#117

Post by giraffe_lady »

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #61
sdrothrock wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a heads up: "crypto Jew" is also an antisemitic buzz word, which is why I suspect the linked article says "hidden" instead.

That is getting so tiring. How are normal people supposed to navigate in this world where normal words[1] and expressions are constantly being re-analyzed as fascist dogwhistles? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto-Judaism

Same way you navigate everything else, by paying attention and making frequent and small adjustments as you acquire new information? You chose a good metaphor: selecting a straight line and expecting not to deviate from it is not "navigation" in any useful sense.

Re: New Mexico is losing a form of Spanish spoken nowhere else

#118

Post by watwut »

ars wrote: post #106
watwut wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The migrants moved there with explicit plan to create dominance. The dominance did nit happened through kumbaya happy agreement of everyone that one language is known by all.

That's BS. They moved there because it was their homeland.

They moved there after hundreds of years of not living there. It was homeland of someone else and they made it their own. But the process was not friendly. Anti-semitism in those other places was also very real .. but the homeland itself was a new place for massive amount of those people and peoples got pushed out.

Re: New Mexico is losing a form of Spanish spoken nowhere else

#119

Post by NelsonMinar »

sdrothrock wrote: post #58
NelsonMinar wrote: post #38

New Mexico Hispanic culture is quite different from a lot of the rest of the US. And the rural areas were very isolated for a long time. So it has some other interesting historical Spanish cultural variants. A couple: The Penitentes, an ascetic Catholic group. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penitentes_(New_Mexico) The Crypto-Jews, usually thought to be a hundreds-years-old vestige of Judaism fleeing the Inquisition. T…

Just a heads up: "crypto Jew" is also an antisemitic buzz word, which is why I suspect the linked article says "hidden" instead.

ugh thanks for the warning, I'd forgotten about the hate speech. No doubt they use "hidden Jew" hatefully too.

Re: New Mexico is losing a form of Spanish spoken nowhere else

#120

Post by anthk »

dghughes wrote: post #113
el-salvador wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is the exception, rather than the rule, but there are two Nahuatl words that have been borrowed widely to other languages. They can be found in a recognizable form even as far away as Finnish, Korean, Indonesian, Japanese and Emoji. Chocolate from Xocolatl Tomato from Tomatl

Ah yes I can see that it makes sense. But I guess I was under the impression what was meant was a small area of southern Spain and its language was more heavily affected that loanwords. Perhaps structure too not just using words for items that didn't exist in the Old World.

Yes, they has been affected. It has more Arabic loanwords (in use) than the rest of Spain.

Such as "babuchas" for sneakers/slippers instead of zapatillas.

But of course lots of words from the New World's Native Trives arrived to Spain: poncho, chocolate, coyote, cacahuete...

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