Having run into Cubans in Panama during the Haitian/Cuban refugee crisis in the
middle 90s, I can honestly say they had the worst pronunciation of any Latin
American country I have ever encountered, even the Panamanians couldn't
understand them! :)
Shells:)
Sent on the Sprint® Now Network from my BlackBerry®
-----Original Message-----
From: "Raymond E. Feist" <[email protected]>
Sender: [email protected]
Date: Tue, 8 Nov 2011 12:39:48
To: feistfans-l<[email protected]>
Reply-To: "feistfans-l" <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: New "get to know you" question
On Nov 8, 2011, at 11:05 AM, Matthew Rosier wrote:
>
>
> I don't have much knowledge on linguistics, but I can tell you my wife says
> Castellano is spoken in Mexico (which of course is still MOSTLY Spanish). She
> always just says Spanish though casually as well.
Syntactically, she's correct, formal Spanish is the official language of
Mexico. Pronunciation wise, she's a little too far to the east. Most of the
early speakers of Spanish who came to the new world were not from Castile, but
from the west of Spain in Estamadura and other hard-scrable places where life
was hard. So they didn't have the "high" speech, hence no "th" sounds, the
"ceceo" which evolved in Castilian and is today used for "z" and the ç or
cedilla.
To further illustrate except for Brazil (Portuguese) Belize & Guiana,
(English), French Guiana (French) and Curaçao (Dutch), everyone in Latin
America speaks Spanish. But you'll discover that it's spoken in Chili with a
different accent than in Columbia, and that's different from Paraguay, etc.
And you get into the Caribbean, you get even more diversity. Study Spanish in
Mexico then listen to people from Cuba or Puerto Rico and the contractions will
make you nuts.
It's like the accents and slang in the US and UK, it varies from region to
region.
But it's Spanish in Mexico, not "Mexican."
Best, R.E.F.
----
www.crydee.com
Never attribute to malice what can satisfactorily be explained away by
stupidity.
