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Comment by tgv | Hacker News Reader

> This is exactly the sort of thing that’s been happening in Miami.

The example quoted is exactly the sort of thing that's not going on.

And where's the threshold for calling people bilingual? If you say "get down from the car," you're (likely) using that phrase only to people outside your environment. It's lack of fluency.

> “Thanks God,” a type of loan translation from “gracias a Dios,” is common in Miami. In this case, speakers analogize the “s” sound at the end of “gracias” and apply it to the English form.

That's just an assumption of the "mmm, let me think 2 seconds" kind.

The writer also calls it Spanish, but e.g. beef is "ternera" in Spanish. It might be Cuban Spanish, which has a fairly large vocabulary that differs from other Spanish variants.

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> If you say "get down from the car," you're (likely) using that phrase only to people outside your environment. It's lack of fluency.

Fluency doesn't mean you never make such mistakes, and it also doesn't prevent you picking up unusual phrasing from your environment, even when it might have originated as a mistake. In a heavily German but English-speaking workplace, it's not just the Germans who use “until” to mean “by”.

Using a locally different sentence structure isn't a lack of fluency, it's just a different dialect.

Here in the UK every region speaks English differently. Sure, there's a kind of "standard" English spoken on TV, but the further you get from London the less it's spoken. It's not just a question of accents and local words for things, but of sentence structure too - for instance the Scots dialect has quite radically different ways of saying things than "standard" English.

The people who speak Scots are completely fluent in their local dialect. Just because the language they speak doesn't happen to correspond with the culturally dominant variant doesn't make them wrong.

Scotland is particularly interesting to me since language occurs on a continuum between Scottish Standard English (SSE) and the Scots language.

SSE features unique words ("The word 'outwith' is not used outwith Scotland") and constructions (a waiter will ask "What are you wanting?" instead of "What would you like?", and after receiving the first order they'll ask the next person "And for yourself?" instead of, e.g., "And for you?").

Scots at its Scotsiest can look like this:

> What ken ye what may cast up the morn? For whatlike is your life? Ye ar but a waff o rouk at kythes a weeock, an syne eelies awa. Ye war better tae say, "Gin it's God's will, we'll be ey tae the fore, an we s' dae this or that." But no ye, na: ye blaw an blowst o what ye'r tae dae.

And speakers will choose a point somewhere between SSE and broad Scots depending on who they're speaking with, the formality, etc. It's quite common to get Scots words like "wee", "dreich", "swither", etc. The next step up is cannae/dinnae/widnae/etc for couldn't/don't/wouldn't/etc. I recently had a Shetlander say I was "glinderin ida sun". And then at some point it switches from "SSE with a Scots influence" to "Scots".

> but e.g. beef is "ternera" in Spanish

Beef is "res" or sometimes "carne" as the article mentions, "ternera" is specifically the young calf's meat.

when you get a taco with "carne asada", it means grilled beef. "pollo asado" means grilled chicken

but "carne de cerdo" means pork meat, so it depends on the context and spanish variation

"Thanks God" from "Gracias a Dios"

^^^ this is kinda weird considering Cuban Spanish omits the S (and often half the rest of the letters in any given sentence, lol, at least to my lower intermediate Spanish ears), resulting in "Gracia Dio"

Yeah, thought that was a weird claim. I'd wager that the form "thanks" is more frequent than "thank" in most people's English, making it easy for an L2 speaker to hypercorrect.

Omitting the /s/ is an oversimplification. Classically what happens in accents like that is that /s/ is rendered as [h]. People do this aspiration to varying extents, sometimes omitting totally, sometimes not. Presence of a vowel following nearby can make a full formed [s] appear. The "a" in gracias a dios could easily make that into "gracias a dio".

By the way I had a coworker who was a native Arabic speaker say "thanks God" a lot. I think "thank God" is a phrasing that throws off a lot of people learning English, from multiple language backgrounds.

Indeed, i'm Cuban and we might sound like "Graciah a Diò".

> The writer also calls it Spanish, but e.g. beef is "ternera" in Spanish. It might be Cuban Spanish, which has a fairly large vocabulary that differs from other Spanish variants.

You are discovering the difference between castellano and español; in addition to ternera, it's bife in some parts of South America.

What do you mean with "castellano" vs "español"? I'm a native speaker and over here we call the language in general "castellano". For me the two words are synonymous (i.e. both refer to the general language, not to some specific dialect).

Presumably that Castellano is Latin American Spanish and Español is Spanish Spanish.

Nop, both are ways of calling the same language.

The Spanish Royal Academy makes it clear: https://www.rae.es/dpd/espa%C3%B1ol

But your answer doesn’t make sense in this context. The original commenter used both of these words as if they were different. So clearly they didn’t mean that they are both “ways of calling the same language”.

Some Latin Americans will call their language Castellano. Then my guess—since one can only guess what the hell people mean—was that this has something to do with the difference between Spanish from Spain and Spanish from whatever Latin American country. (But who knows?)

Furthermore, you’ll see that the original context was Cuban Spanish versus whatever “Spanish” without any adjective means. Do you really think that your little pet peeve about the intra-politics of Spanish languages are relevant in this context? People weren’t talking about the differences between Catalan and Spanish!

> The Spanish Royal Academy makes it clear: https://www.rae.es/dpd/espa%C3%B1ol

Since you’re so sensitive to minority languages and whatnot, maybe you’ll understand that “settlers” might have their own words that might deviate from an Academy based in Spain.

The Royal Academy covers every dialect of Spanish and their lexicon it's composed of all the Spanish language words spoken from Mexico to Patagonia among Iberia.

It's dictionary has nearly every Spanish term registered, no matter which side of the Atlantic you choose.

RAE doesn't dictate which dialect of the Spanish it's the "correct" one. Every Spanish language subdialect it's the correct one.

For instance, the spelling of z/c before a-o-u/e-i as either /s/ or /th/ depends on the dialect you choose. https://dle.rae.es/c

All Spanish language spoken in all countries is subject to the rules of the Royal Academy of Spanish[1] and the Association of the Academies of Spanish Language[2]. Both institutions work together in keeping an up-to-date dictionary with terms from speakers of all parts of the world.

To counter-point your claims, there are a myriad of dialects of Spanish inside Spain. Some of them even are similar to the ones used in Hispanic-America.

I'm not talking about the other languages of Spain: Aragonese, Asturian, Basque, Catalan, Galician, Valencian, Extremaduran, etc. I'm only talking about the language that is official in all Spain, Spanish (and its dialects).

[1] https://www.rae.es/

[2] https://www.asale.org/

Other commenter got it wrong. There are multiple dialects/languages (eg Gallego, Catalan) spoken in Spain that aren’t really common in the new world, the new world dialects are mostly based on the Castilian (castellano) dialect which was and is the prestige/official Spanish dialect promoted by the government and which settlers likely had in common.

In other words, “Español”could be thought of as a group of Spanish languages with “Castellano” being a distinct language within that group.

I guess not to further muddy the waters but saying Gallego and Catalan come from Castellano is extremely problematic (though people do this, it’s still difficult to square factually)

They all come from Vulgar Latin and depending on how you split it but Portuguese and Gallego come from a common ancestor and one has an easier time understanding Gallego if one speaks Portuguese than if one speaks only Spanish and Catalan would be a post until itself once we start discussing Occitan and Valencian, but it’s also not descended from Spanish (Gallo-Romance)

TLDR I really wish people would stop according Castellano as an official language and a bunch of languages that are as older or older than Castellano as some dialect descending from Castellano.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galician-Portuguese

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_language

I didn’t say it came from Castellano! I’m saying they’re all three Spanish languages/dialects. Linguistically I would consider Gallego just as real a language or dialect as Castellano, it just happens that the central Spanish government historically made Castellano into their favored tongue and not Gallego.

Castellano is the official language of the Spanish government from eg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Spanish_Academy and of course decades of repression of regional languages under eg the Franco regime. I don’t mean official as in “the true language” I mean official as in “the Spanish government/regime/royal dialect for centuries”. To the point many people as you mention equate Castellano with “Spanish” which is just not true - I agree with you

Maybe I am misunderstanding your comment but it's not me that is making Castillian "official" - I think it's bullshit that other Spanish languages aren't treated with more respect it's - the historical reality that it was accorded official status due to the political dominance of Castile and consequently the use of Castillian as a common tongue

How do you make a distinction between the language they speak in Castile(s) and the one that use in other regions and is official in all Spain? You can't.

I speak Spanish but I'm not Castilian and has no relationship with those two regions (Castile-Leon and Castile-La Mancha).

Galician is a language on its own! Indeed one of the most famous kings in medieval history in Spain (Alfonso X) wrote poems in Galician because he just liked the language[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantigas_de_Santa_Maria

Yes one of my favorites also, I’ve watched a couple of series in it and quite like it!

It's interesting that Alfonso X chose Galician as a poetic language instead of the most common one among their subjects (Spanish). He had Galician in a higher standard that Spanish. That's amazing considering the impact he had in the evolution of Spanish.

> Other commenter got it wrong.

Are you sure?

> There are multiple dialects/languages (eg Gallego, Catalan) spoken in Spain that aren’t really common in the new world, the new world dialects are mostly based on the Castilian (castellano) dialect which was and is the prestige/official Spanish dialect promoted by the government and which settlers likely had in common.

Let’s see if e.g. Catalan is really relevant here.

It clearly is not. Why? The original commenter brought up the supposed differences between “castellano” and “español” in the context of Cuban Spanish. The minority languages of Spain are completely irrelvant here.

There are places in Latin America where they call their Spanish “castellano” (in Spanish). While other places call it “español”. And in that context they do just mean “Spanish”, since they have no reason to care about the minority languages of Spain.

So my shot in the dark guess was that the original commenter meant to refer to the difference between Spanish spoken in Spain and Spanish spoken in Latin America.

Some people will use the term castellano as a way to refer to Spanish, as spoken in Spain, as opposed to 'español de España". They probably aren't looking too deeply into the differences between speakers in Spain though, as when one compares a speaker from, say, Asturias, who will probably never use half of the past tenses, and might even use an even more irregular version of ser, vs someone from different parts of Andalucia, where you could cut the /s/ sound, or the /c/ sound, or the /z/ sound, or even multiples.

Ultimately the fun part of talking about languages is that no matter how much one person might believe that their terms are clear and unambiguous, if the community of speakers is large enough, you are bound to find competing meanings either way.

Spaniard here. Both castellano and español refer to the same language everywhere.

As another [half-]Spaniard I can confirm this. If anything, in Spain the only difference between "español" and "castellano" is context. The term "español" is mostly used when contrasting Spanish to foreign languages (inglés, francés, chino...), while "castellano" is almost always used when contrasting it to other languages of Spain (catalán, gallego, vasco, aranés...).

And? Spanish from Spain uses parking while everyone else uses "estacionamiento". RAE covers both and calls Spanish to the same language spoken from Mexico to Patagonia and Iberia.

There is no difference: castellano is just a way of calling español language. They are synonyms.

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