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New Mexico is losing a form of Spanish spoken nowhere else
- webmaven 4y agohttps://archive.md/zXyg2 https://archive.md/zXyg2
- fzvqq 4y ago[flagged]
- sam537 4y agoThe lowest of the low? Based on consonant pronunciation? How can you extract a value judgment from how someone speaks?
- ithkuil 4y agoSadly that's what humans do and have done since forever and it is an important driving factor in language evolution
- b800h 4y agoVia a class system. US movies imply you have the same thing over there.
- jghn 4y agoYes. It's not unlike how people assume someone with a rural/southern US accent is dumb.
- ChuckNorris89 4y agoAccent based class system and discrimination is rampant everywhere: UK, Italy, Romania, Austria, etc.
- jfengel 4y agoEvery language group has a hierarchy of accents, often roughly corresponding to wealth. There is usually a prestige accent used by the wealthy, and which the upper classes mimic. And everyone looks down on rural people, marked by their accent. It's worse in some places than others but it's practically universal.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- fcatalan 4y agoThere's a bit of "accentism" in Spain. Speaking with a southern accent will (wrongly) mark you as "lazy", "uncultured" or "unsophisticated" to some people. I was born in Castile, so I usually speak "accentless" standard Spanish, but my mother comes from Extremadura, just a couple hours drive to the south, and when I speak to her I involuntarily switch to the extremaduran accent. I don't notice it but other people hearing me for the first time are shocked by the sudden switch. Extremaduran accent has the same aspirated x and s mentioned in the article, so for "This is Extremadura" I'll tend to say "Ehto é Ehtremaura" to my mother and "Esto es Extremadura" to other people. Another curiosity is that many of the original "conquistadores" (Cortés, Pizarro) hailed from Extremadura.
- ChainOfFools 4y agoI've noticed strong shades of this in various dialects of Caribbean Spanish too; I didn't know there was a name for it much less a possibly correlated colonial origin.
- ttfkam 4y agoI 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.
- salomon812 4y agoNorthern New Mexico uses "vosotros." No one told us not to. (Or so I'm told, see my main comment.)
- prpl 4y agoI actually learned both in high school (Las Cruces) but moved to Utah and dropped vos/vosotros. (grew up in Farmington before that)
- fcatalan 4y agoOf course it's just another variety, but it's the one equivalent to the Received Pronunciation or "BBC English". People also tend to consider it the "original" one because, well... the language started in Castile. Up until a couple decades ago, if you wanted to have a career on national TV, radio or as an actor, toning down any other accent and switching to Castilian was a requirement, or at least would help a lot. Nowadays not so much, but still happens enough that in Spain a Castilian accent is perceived as "not having one".
- jcranmer 4y agoIt's using pronunciation to infer regional/class origins, and it's widespread in most languages. See for example southern accents in American English, which can be associated with rednecks.
- the_only_law 4y ago> How can you extract a value judgment from how someone speaks? I mean it’s not exactly uncommon. I have the luck of having a southern U.S. accent and I’ve been told (mostly by people from outside the US in fairness) that they were surprised I wasn’t a raging racist.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Turing_Machine 4y agoAsk anyone who has a "hillbilly" accent how they're treated by "educated" people.
- mejutoco 4y agoInterestingly, I have often seen in movies with hillbilly characters dubbed to Spanish, their accent is dubbed in andalusian accent. I alway found it quite offensive.
- anthk 4y agoIt shouldn't be. Most of the people who went from Spain overseas was from Andalucia, the South American accent came from the Southern Spain. Also, lots of spelling traits in Southern English from the US map 1:1 to Andalusian Spanish, such as omiting vowels between consonants and speaking really fast.
- mejutoco 4y agoI am not sure if that is true (it might be). In Argentina they call spaniards gallegos, like from Galicia, the Spanish region north of Portugal. Do you have an example of omiting vowels between consonants? IMO the whole Spain speaks quite fast.
- anthk 4y agoAh, sorry, I guess I was droopy. I meant consonant between vowels: Reventado -> Reventao Colocado -> Colocao On vowels between consonants, maybe "tarántula" -> Trántula spelling it really fast in a hurry. But what I meant with the Andalusian accent being really fast and omiting vowels, they do in a way pretty close to the Southern US English accent. Also, the Andalusians got a lot of arabisms (more than former Spanish) such as zaguán, babuchas, alcancía, alhaja, alcoba... the same way the Southern US English got lots of borrowings from Spanish.
- mejutoco 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- JoeDaDude 4y agoNative Spanish speaker here, giving two observations. First, it's not unusual to aspirate the "s" sound in Spanish spoken in the Caribbean countries, particularly if it precedes a consonant, hear several examples in [1]. While this is reserved for informal colloquial speech, it is not an indication of social class. Second, I realize there is a gray divide between what constitutes a dialect and what is just regional accent and slang, but I only hear the latter in the examples given in TFA. I'd expect a lot more differences, bordering on unintelligible, before I call it a dialect. Maybe I'll change my mind if I hear more examples of New Mexico Spanish, but for now, it just sounds like some peculiar word choices and not a completely different dialect, [1]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9EXc9UkJtA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9EXc9UkJtA
- salomon812 4y ago> I'd expect a lot more differences, bordering on unintelligible, before I call it a dialect. I'm not sure if I could help you with examples since it's my father's tongue, not mind. But I assure you, he found it very difficult to communicate with other Spanish speakers in California. However, he did have a much easier time talking with someone that grew up in the Philippines! I do remember very distinctly that my dad did not know the word "dormir" or "to sleep" and the word he had started with "ad" but I don't remember it. > but for now, it just sounds like some peculiar word choices. Remember, the area is changing. The Spanish that's being spoken in New Mexico is altering to match the wider world. If you want older dialect, you really do have to find people in their 50's or older.
- maxbond 4y ago> However, he did have a much easier time talking with someone that grew up in the Philippines! Who presumably spoke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chavacano https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chavacano (a dialect with a similar origin, though of course different geography & local influences) Or maybe a dialect I've never heard of even, the Philippines is an incredibly linguistically diverse area. A woman I know from the Philippines grew up speaking 5 languages.
- VeninVidiaVicii 4y ago
- kgeist 4y agoThis phonetical change occured in Ancient Greek. For example, the root helio- "sun" stems from earlier sawelio-. This change also occured in French, for example, the French word for "forest" is now pronounced without -s- and at some point it had -h-. This sound change occured in Sanskrit, where final -s became -h It's called debuccalization and it's very common in many languages.
- nomdep 4y ago[flagged]
- salomon812 4y agoAbsolutely not. If it was just an accent, I'd like back all those times my father couldn't help with my Spanish homework.
- bombcar 4y agoIt’s like how Portuguese is just a Spanish with a heavy accent. And Italian is just accented Latin. There are recognizable words but the meanings are entirely different - English between America and Australia used to be this way (we since have crushed Australia with Hollywood so hard that it’s now closer enough).
- iancmceachern 4y agoNeither of those are true. They have similar roots, but dismissing entire languages and cultures in this way is super disrespectful
- bombcar 4y agoI should have added the required /sarcasm tag, apparently.
- mejutoco 4y agoAccent and dialect, dialect and language, all dependvon having their own grammar and particular history.
- nortonham 4y agoif you read the article it clearly isn't just the accent
- iancmceachern 4y agoWow, worst most ignorant comment I've seen on HN in a long time here
- anthk 4y agoNowhere else... just the whole South of Spain. At least the aspiration.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dghughes 4y ago>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?
- anthk 4y agoBecause "imports" of foreign goods. All of them, from the Pyrenees to Patagonia. From chocolate to cacahuete to who knows how many more kinds of food.
- el-salvador 4y agoIt 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
- dghughes 4y agoAh 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.
- anthk 4y agoYes, 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...
- salomon812 4y agoThis is my family. Sadly, the language dies with my generation. My father speaks this dialect of Spanish... or at least, he used to. We moved to Northern California when I was very little. But, if we had stayed in New Mexico, my cousins don't speak it either. I asked Dad why he didn't teach me. "What would I do? Speak it to myself?" I took Spanish in high school. My father really couldn't help me, some of the basic phrases were different. As more immigrants moved into our area, Dad connected with them and started to learned the more modern Spanish to communicate with them. I mean, this dialect formed because Northern New Mexico was so isolated. The Manhattan Project changed a lot of that. Suddenly, Los Alamos labs and Sandia labs connected New Mexico with the rest of the world. It wasn't as isolated anymore. People have told me I could learn it, but I've tried. It's hard when I talk with my family, I'd rather have an adult conversation now rather than basically a preschool level one to learn the language. They say to really learn it, you have to immerse yourself. I lived with my grandmother for several months once while working at Sandia Labs. She insisted on speaking English with me, she was stubborn about it, and I was having a hard enough time understanding her in English. Let me leave you with a funny story. My uncle had hired a contractor to help with his house. The contractor spoke common Spanish. And he angrily confronted my uncle in Spanish: "You stole my belt!" or at least that's what my uncle heard. "[You stole] mi cinta!" However, in New Mexico "cinta" means belt, but in Mexico it's short for "cinta métrica" or tape measure. (or so I'm told, I don't speak Spanish!) My uncle assured him he did not steal it and went ahead and gave him one of his own.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago> My father speaks this dialect of Spanish... or at least, he used to. We moved to Northern California when I was very little. But, if we had stayed in New Mexico, my cousins don't speak it either. I asked Dad why he didn't teach me. "What would I do? Speak it to myself?" I have the same reasoning. I speak a language that is not necessary anymore even in the place my parents came from, since the national language and English are what official business is done in. My grandparents taught me the language, but none of my cousins have a similar grasp of the language. I still speak it with the older generations in my family, but they do not live near me to interact often enough with my kids, so I would effectively be teaching them a language they will have no use for by the time they are adults.
- elboru 4y agoThis Spanish has similarities with the one used in some areas of Chihuahua Mexico (south of New Mexico) specially at the Sierra Madre Occidental mountains. It makes sense since many original Hispanic New Mexican families have consanguinity with old Chihuahua families.
- NelsonMinar 4y agoNew 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) 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. The truth is probably more complicated. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/12/mistaken-identity-the-case-of-new-mexicos-hidden-jews/378454/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/12/mistake... New Mexico is also home to a bunch of different Native American languages and cultures, many of which did not have the trauma of being forced to move to new land and thus have a different relationship with their history. (This post feels clumsy of me, apologies if as an outsider I mis-characterized something.)
- sdrothrock 4y agoJust a heads up: "crypto Jew" is also an antisemitic buzz word, which is why I suspect the linked article says "hidden" instead.
- LudwigNagasena 4y agoThat 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto-Judaism
- sdrothrock 4y agoMy general impression, possibly out of ignorance, has been that there have always been lots of these and people (read: me) were just unaware of them. Some, like this (and "88" on usernames) are sometimes (often?) legitimate but have also been used as dog whistles... and fascism stains everything it touches.
- 4y ago
- VeninVidiaVicii 4y agoThis is my dialect! We’ve always attracted linguists because of our unique mix of cultures. For instance, we have lots of words for turkey - guíjalo/guajalote (and various combinations of the two), pavo, ganso real, cócono, and yes, even torque.
- nortonham 4y agoguajalote is common with everyone I've meet from mexico and parts of central america, so is pavo
- nortonham 4y agoand to add to that, pavo is often used just to refer to the food, the cooked meat, and guajalote to the animal. Same for pigs (Cerdo, chancho) and pork (puerco).
- davidw 4y agoHuh... "pavone" is peacock in Italian.
- metaltyphoon 4y agoclose to Portuguese too, pavão
- nortonham 4y agothey're related languages after all
- ansraliant 4y agoin Argentina pavo also is used to refer to someone that is not very intelligent.
- anthk 4y agoIn Spanish from Spain, both being a clown or just a random dude. (No seas pavo, don't be a clown), and "oye, pavo, ¿dónde vas?" (Hey, dude, where're you going to)?
- MagicMoonlight 4y agoThis reminds me of the bog people I met who live on a lake in floating mud huts. They’re all complaining that their children move away to go to school and live in cities etc. Is the bog life really worth preserving? You basically just want to preserve these weird cultures for the sake of it, not because anyone benefits from it. Obviously children want electricity or to speak an actually used language rather than follow the meme culture. Why should we force them to suffer just to preserve that suffering?
- iancmceachern 4y agoI think you have the wrong take. Preserving the culture and language doesn't lead to the things you are describing. Those results are separate. Examples you should look to are how French has been preserved and protected in Montreal, Creole in the South, Catalan in Spain, on and on. Those places have managed to preserve their language and culture while also improving their standard and quality of life on par with modern western standards.
- trgn 4y ago> preserve these weird cultures for the sake of it, not because anyone benefits from it If the world ever turns into grey goo, it won't be because of an out of control AI, it will be because actual people have willed it into the world.
- UncleEntity 4y agoMy stepdad’s parents moved from New Mexico to California but never taught their kids Spanish because they didn’t want them to have an accent. Was a thing in the 50s, I guess. I’ve always found it amusing they grew up six miles from each other but met in California.
- n8henrie 4y agoInteresting. I've lived in NM -- mostly northern -- for over 20 years now. I minored in Spanish and continue to strive to improve my mediocre fluency. I take multiple trips to the Sangre de Cristo area every year for camping and fishing. And yet I don't recall ever having heard of a discrete NM dialect. TIL!
- codeddesign 4y ago[flagged]
- dang 4y agoCould you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
- codeddesign 4y agoFlamebaiting? So it’s ok when people are talking about NPR or Twitter, but not being against promotion of non-English language in the US? Come on.. On a side note: I’ve requested for my account to be deleted multiple times. Requests have been denied. Until then.. Never would I conduct personal direct attacks, but I will speak my mind. I’m more than happy to point out more than a dozen terms violations of others within the past week that seem to go untouched. Either moderate all based on terms or don’t.
- dang 4y agoConsistency in moderation is impossible because there are far too many posts for us to read them all. If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=likeliest%20explanation%20by%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... People always feel like the mods are against their team when they get moderated, but that's an illusion. We don't track (or care) what users' views are. We care when they're breaking the site guidelines, which you have been doing repeatedly. I can only find one record of you emailing us about deleting your account. It looks like I replied to you 10 minutes later and you never responded.
- chaostheory 4y agoI don’t feel that this is a bad thing. Not being able to speak and understand each other’s languages just helps increase conflict due to less empathy. While there are cons to less spoken languages, overall the world would be better off with less spoken languages.
- Bjorkbat 4y agoLanguage is pretty foundational to culture. When you lose a language you lose more than a way of speaking, but also the subtleties and emotions behind the "shape" of certain words, not to mention those words that reflect something so unique to that culture that you can't really translate them. The death of a language is the death of a world. Saying there should be fewer spoken languages is frankly a very unempathetic thing to say.
- chaostheory 4y agoSaying there should be more different languages shows an ignorance to both history and psychology. Having less major cultures has the same effect on potential conflict
- pg_1234 4y agoAnd there's the cost of keeping a dying language alive. You're basically asking people to sacrifice their lives to a less useful language, a mere social utility, so you can maintain a sort of "cultural linguistic zoo" ... and yes you are by this analogy relegating them to the role of animals in a theme park. Think of what that entails: "No, you can't be taught in the language that will get you into university and get you the best jobs. You must dedicate a significant portion portion of your life to something we already know is a dead end for you personally, because we have decided that it is more important that a legacy tool be kept alive than that you prosper as a person."
- scoofy 4y ago>not to mention those words that reflect something so unique to that culture that you can't really translate them You've inverted the role of language. Language is what we use to communicate the things we feel, we gain essentially nothing from the words themselves. Even when you think you're communicating something very specific with the words you are using, there's little reason to believe that the person on the other end of the conversation really gets what you're trying to communicate. In a practical sense, you can easily communicate, but these deep, almost mystical, meanings you're implying... it's just not really something that can be known. The is the point of the indeterminacy of translation illustrated by W.V. Quine.
- guywithahat 4y agoIt's always sad to see dialects die, however unless you're trying to decrease migration between neighboring countries (such as Israel speaking Hebrew) it seems like a good thing. In the case of New Mexico, it's a US state and I don't see an advantage in keeping it around.
- ars 4y ago> unless you're trying to decrease migration between neighboring countries (such as Israel speaking Hebrew) Say what now? Israelis don't speak Hebrew to "decrease migration", they speak Hebrew because it's their ancestral language with a greater than 3,000 year history.
- guywithahat 4y agoAlthough I agree in that there's certainly room for debate, it's a fact Israel has strict immigration laws, many of these laws are focused around keeping local Muslim populations out while bringing global Jewish populations in, and when Israel was founded millions of Jewish people from the neighboring countries (namely Egypt and Saudi Arabia) moved to Israel. They could have spoken a local language or even a European one, but they decided to learn the (at the time extinct) language Hebrew was because it was unique to Jews, and this was a Zionist country and movement.
- ars 4y agoThere was no such thing as a "local language" there. They spoke a very wide variety of language - one article collected 40 different languages spoken there. Mandatory Palestine was not a country at that time, and had nothing unifying it. The reason all those migrants switched to Hebrew is that it was the only common tongue among all of them. Why in the world would they pick a European language? If anything maybe Yiddish, but as you write there were lots of people from Arab countries who didn't speak it. But everyone knew Hebrew. It's really the only language that made sense. And it was not extinct, everyone knew it. Maybe it wasn't their cradle language, but everyone could make themselves understood in it. You have this weird subtext that the place was Arab and Jews came in - that's not accurate at all, Jews never left Israel (Palestine). The migrants joined existing Jews.
- deafpolygon 4y agoIt'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 to the school were still doing it the way they learned at home, and the ones who has been there for 2-3 years were signing in a similar style. It was interesting to see. Language is a living, constantly evolving, thing - you can't 'preserve' it any more than you would preserve a living tree in a book.
- midoridensha 4y ago>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.
- MisterBastahrd 4y agoReminds me a bit of Louisiana French (technically two closely related dialects of Cajun French and Louisiana Creole). French was the dominant household language in the state until the 1920s when it was banned from being the primary language in public schools by the state government. This ultimately started the first in a slew of segregational choices by parents with regards to their kids' schools: some were incensed that they were being stripped of their heritage and sent their kids to French speaking Catholic schools. People were urged to "speak White," which was code for "speak proper English." In turn, the Catholic schools stopped teaching the local dialect in favor of Standard French. When the state also demanded that the Catholic schools teach English, students couldn't understand their teachers and were often beaten for failing to make progress in class. The state ended up with half a generation of children who could barely understand what they were being taught. As a result, parents stopped teaching their kids to speak their native language, which was replaced with English. Today, most of us from the area speak English but will mix in language from the old Cajun / Creole dialects of the past. Did you know that the X-Men's Gambit has pronounced the word "cher" incorrectly every single time he's ever used it in mass media? From Shreveport to Grand Isle, we pronounce it "sha." Usually used as a term of endearment for a male to a female, we also use it when we agree with anyone with the phrase "Mais yeah, cher!"
- decafninja 4y agoTraveling 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.
- veqq 4y ago> They want to teach their son both, but can’t. Yes, they can. It is very easy. Each parent only speaks to the child in their own language. That is all. ---------------- The children of immigrants lose languages because their parents are ignorant of basic pedagogy (in most cases the parents just raise the kids in English, then get mad they don't magically know the language they were barely exposed to.) Presumably, they think they should have full conversations with each other in Korean and Chinese to expose the kid - however as a baby understands that they speak all 3 languages, the baby would default to the most common one (English). The key here is to establish boundaries of language use e.g.: "I speak Chinese to dad. I speak Korean to mom." The parents should not respond to the child in English - they have to preserve the boundary to encourage the kid to use the other languages. If one of them uses English with the child, it will greatly weaken or ruin the effect. Adding cartoons, other speakers etc. for these languages helps but isn't as fundamentally necessary as this. You can even add multiple nannies which only speak their own language to the child. (There is some amount of regular exposure needed, but that's not an issue for 2 parents.) The child will pick up English from other children and tv.
- 4y ago