Colegio vs universidad

[SPX]

Don't take it so seriously.

[aleCcowaN]

If I didn't, why I'd bother to even be a member? A language forum matches Wikipedia way much better than a chat room. Re-usability and universal value are the key points. Language forums are support for dictionary developers, translators and serious students of foreign languages.

On the contrary, you should take it seriously.

[SPX]

My point is that all I said is that, logically speaking, it's strange how languages can change so much over small geographic areas. I've tried to illustrate this with my Alphabet example, but you don't seem to understand what I'm saying because you're making it into something it's not and something that I never said or implied.

[aleCcowaN]

It all went well until some "Belizean Spanish" appeared over the inexplicit terms for "colegio" and "universidad". The point here about the educational system is the every country created their own, so terms may differ but it doesn't mean that an educated person can't understand them 80 or 90% of times. What you know as high school was historically associated to universities or they were local institutions that gathered teachers and students (colegios) to give them the first half of high studies in cities where there wasn't a university, so when the youngsters were 16, 17 or 18 they could leave their families and go to pursue their laurels. Many of them wouldn't get accepted and some recognition they would have to get: something that resembled the crown of laurel (laureola) with young tiny drupes in it (bacca) usually given at university, so they became baccalaureate, "bachilleres", then "bachillerato". In other countries and times, foreign educators -French, Belgian, British and Swiss, mainly- established institutions copying the systems in their countries of origin, what is called "liceo", mostly for young women who couldn't pursue an university degree.

The story may continue with a lot of names, all of them came from the common patrimony of our language and perfectly clear to any educated person. Of course, any hillbilly in any country that manages just two thousand words would only know the one used around the corner -or around the pecan tree-. In my city I have "secundarias" and if I walk 45 minutes I change district and I'd have "polimodales" instead, and we are in the same city, and I don't have to walk through Chinatown or Any-town to get there. Change of language in a small zone? I don't think so. Resistance to uniformity? Certainly. Why otherwise it would be 20 countries where a few viceroyalties existed?

[Caballero]

Everything you say is correct, but it's also a little misleading. I mean, the kind of English spoken in Washington state is pretty much the same thing you're going to hear in Ohio, and that's a pretty big geographic area.

I'm not quite sure what an Ohio accent sounds like, but I do know what a Chicago accent, a Minneapolis accent, a Fargo accent sound like, and I can assure you that they sound nothing like a Washington or other far Western accent. In a large area of the Midwest, there is an extra vowel distinction that hasn't existed in the far Western US for almost 100 years--the vowel in cot and caught. Someone from Chicago, for instance would most likely pronounce them differently, but over 95% of far Westerners (and 99% of Canadians) and people from some areas of the Midwest would neither pronounce nor even be able to hear when someone from the Midwest distinguished them--to the merged regions, it is just another spelling thing to remember--cot/caught; Don/Dawn; tot/taught, bot/bought. There is also a new vowel shift that has occurred in many cities in the Midwest such as Chicago, which makes the accent immediately recognizable to people from the far West.
----
As for colegio, universidad, and escuela, there is even a difference in usage between North American English and British English for those terms. In the US, for instance, someone that went to Yale could say:
1)I go to the university.
2)I go to college.
3)I go to school.

But someone from Britain would picture some sort of technical or vocational institution for #2, and for #3 a school below the university level, probably elementary school, as the word "school" can never refers to a university. So anyway, my point is the terms vary from place to place.
-----

My point is that all I said is that, logically speaking, it's strange how languages can change so much over small geographic areas.

Sure they can. You should hear the varieties of Swiss German over in the next mountain. What's even stranger is how languages can change so little over great distances, like Russian. Think about how big Russia is. It's huge. And yet, people often have a really hard time hearing the differences in the dialects from west to east.