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  #21  
Old August 22, 2011, 01:14 PM
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The supposed -and very "imaginative"- differences and features of different "accents" regarding "elisions" and other ""s are some of them wrong and most of them different registers inside the same country and not differences between countries -there are differences indeed, but not elided "s"-. It's the "y'all" and "ain't" this side of the Grande River. Youtube, Skype and all of the monstersphere is not the place to understand how language works as it all becomes the "greatest common divisor" of human communication ¿No' entendemo' o no no' entendemo'? (extremely vulgar register in most countries; between colloquial and vulgar in some regions). This is like discussing that in some "countries" they say "semos ma' i quanno haiga lu' salimo' i lo' bamo' a rrrebenta' ". Poppycock!

If I were to write here a taxonomy of English accents departing from what I hear, what I fail to hear, what I'm not sure about and what I don't know for sure, I could run wild for pages and pages.

Feel free to not understand what I'm saying.
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  #22  
Old August 22, 2011, 01:40 PM
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In the US we learn Latin American Spanish, which has all of those features that you mentioned.

The above was for Perikles.

I've never heard an Argentine pronounce all (or even most of) the s's. You guys might not drop them completely, but you definitely aspirate them, which sounds the same as dropping them to us.
Even your president does that. Maybe not all the final s's, but the other s's (e.g. esta -> ehta)
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Last edited by AngelicaDeAlquezar; August 22, 2011 at 01:57 PM. Reason: Merged back-to-back posts
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  #23  
Old August 22, 2011, 02:30 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Caballero View Post
I've never heard an Argentine pronounce all (or even most of) the s's. You guys might not drop them completely, but you definitely aspirate them, which sounds the same as dropping them to us.
Even your president does that. Maybe not all the final s's, but the other s's (e.g. esta -> ehta)
So you should have been communicating with a very small subset. I bet you simply don't perceive the "s" sound in certain conditions. Pronouncing ending "s" as English "h" is a feature of about one third of the provinces, and some liaison between final and initial "s" is also common (I use it myself when I mimic -without intention- the accent of some people of Santa Fe and Entre Ríos). But a nonpronounced "s" is a feature you'll only hear in very low levels -that doesn't mean that they have no money and they won't show a middle class consumerism, including skyping with Mongols and Bengals, if possible-.

Fortunately I hear the "s", including while communicating with Paraguayan and Bolivian workers. But I can't stand TV programs were everybody shout and speak like they do in the slums, so I save myself the torture of trying to conciliate that kind of an accent -or better, that kind of logics-. About the president, setting aside some "charming vulgarisms" did on purpose now and then to seduce certain sector, lack of "s" sound is not part of this person's defects.

It looks like you are lacking the ability to sort out all the different registers, nuances, regionalisms and idiolects, what would be more than OK, if you didn't insist in lecturing natives and students with your half baked observations.
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Old August 22, 2011, 04:41 PM
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Quote:
I bet you simply don't perceive the "s" sound in certain conditions.
I probably don't hear the s in the same way that you do. In any event, to me at least, the Canarian accent to me seems to be less difficult to understand than the accent from Northern Spain, as to me it sounds more similar to most Latin American accents I've heard. I also don't have any negative associations or prejudices towards it, since to me, an English speaker not yet fluent in Spanish, it's just one more variety of Spanish.
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  #25  
Old August 22, 2011, 05:40 PM
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I've just heard myself saying quickly "¡pero, las cosas que dicen!" where soft and brief "s" sounds clash with hard sounds "k" and I see why you may think we don't pronounce the ending "-s". They may be not only aspirated but even inhaled. I assure you they are there. You are experiencing what Spanish speakers suffer with more than a dozen English sounds. I think that I can translate the problem into a Spanish speaker who tends to say "good-a-books" hearing native speakers saying quickly "good books" and then thinking they are saying "goo books". You'd probably say you pronounce the "d" plenty the same way I assure you we pronounce the "s".

But for Canarians, in a popular level, they do omit the final "s" and even other consonants: "según ello', hablan de lo mejó". But any regional language at a popular level has a lot of strange sounds. Five Spanish vowels -maybe 10 or 12 if you are analytical and strict- become more than two dozens in Paraguayan. They have more a's than English and more e's than French.
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Old August 23, 2011, 08:37 AM
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No soy experto en los acentos pero ello en lugar de ellos que se oye en las islas Canarias parece caribeño, pero a veces en los acentos caribeños la palabra ello está seguida por "j". Es una jota débil.

Tampoco estoy seguro que existe un acento argentino. En los accentos
rioplatences existen, y cualquiera persona que conoce un poquito español
puede identificarlo. Hoy hablé con una señorita de Mendoza, y su acento
tenía poco de ver con el modo en que la gente de Buenos Aires hablan.
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Last edited by poli; August 23, 2011 at 09:06 AM. Reason: spelling error
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  #27  
Old August 23, 2011, 10:07 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by poli View Post
No soy experto en los acentos pero ello en lugar de ellos que se oye en las islas Canarias parece caribeño, pero a veces en los acentos caribeños la palabra ello está seguida por "j". Es una jota débil.

Tampoco estoy seguro que exista un acento argentino. En los accentos
rioplatences existen, y cualquiera persona que conoce un poquito español
puede identificarlo. Hoy hablé con una señorita de Mendoza, y su acento
tenía poco de ver con el modo en que la gente de Buenos Aires hablan.
Of course, there's no such thing as an "Argentinian" accent nor a Canarian accent and least of all a Buenos Aires' accent.

If you do an experiment and gather six people from BA City -3 natives, 2 Argentines migrated and 1 foreigner, which is similar to the population composition-, add a Montevidean and you gather a bunch of porteños and ask who are the three natives by their accents -and looks if you like-, the most likely outcome is a threesome with the Montevidean, an Argentine migrated and just one of the truly natives.

It's just in Internet fora that people buy crayolas and start depicting imaginary realities, like that of having evidently pretty different accents in Spain, but not having that in countries with similar populations, like Colombia and Argentina, but several times bigger, or both several times bigger and 2.5x populated like Mexico, or not much bigger and less populated like Chile, but spread from the latitude of Ethiopia to the latitude of Norway.

The "national" accent or accents are those meta-accents that make pretty uniform the way of speaking of educated people in large cities and highly educated people in small cities and towns, mainly chiseled around the accents of their high-mid-class from their capitals or largest commercial and industrial cities. And it's a matter of geography and not a matter of class. Upper classes are insignificant in numbers and lower-mid and lower classes resist any standardization by staying extremely attached to their localisms.
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Old August 23, 2011, 11:05 AM
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New York has many different accents, but there is a New York sound, and anyone with some English knowledge will be able to distiguish it from the neighboring Philadelphia sound. I know that New York is not unique to this, and, the way it sounds to me, the Buenos Aires sound has Italian inflection that makes it identifiable. This is why I was careful to choose the word acentos rioplatenses instead of acento rioplatense.
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Last edited by poli; August 23, 2011 at 11:26 AM.
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  #29  
Old August 23, 2011, 12:56 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by poli View Post
New York has many different accents, but there is a New York sound, and anyone with some English knowledge will be able to distiguish it from the neighboring Philadelphia sound.
New York accents were many and varied to me when I was there. I think I recognize "el cantito" (the rhythmic part of the accent) from the infectious accent in the musical theme of The Nanny. The movie from the musical Rent reminded me the accents I heard there, but actor Daniel London there sounded a little bit philadelphish to me -an interview where he is speaking in the first part-.

Quote:
Originally Posted by poli View Post
I know that New York is not unique to this, and, the way it sounds to me, the Buenos Aires sound has Italian inflection that makes it identifiable. This is why I was careful to choose the word acentos rioplatenses instead of acento rioplatense.
Lingua castigliana con cadenza napoletana (mimicking "lingua toscana in boca romana"). The very accent of Guillermo Franchella in "El secreto de sus ojos", the de facto standard for Buenos Aires back in the sixties and seventies -Italian rhythm, but not so South Italian-. I speak with a similar accent, but a bit more both South Italian and Genovesi together with gaucho like elements from the 19th century, what reveals I'm from the southern part of downtown Buenos Aires.
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  #30  
Old August 23, 2011, 06:19 PM
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I think Daniel has an educated east coast accent. It's pretty obvious
that he had higher education at a college with a liberal point of view. If he's from Philadelphia, his neighborhood is probably northwest---far from Blue collar tough guys from South Philly or South Jersey (New Jersey) who make the sound their own.

There are examples Philadelphia accents on line; just google Philadelphia accents. Some of them are exaggerated, but there's truth to them. Here's an example of less exaggerated Philadelphia accents. Additionally towel is pronounced tal, for is pronounced foor, and on is pronounced awn. It can sound really goofy to me especially in southern suburbs (northern Delaware).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKpQRgMRAf4
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