I live in an english speaking city with english street names – and Google can’t get those right either. And it is incredibly annoying.
In Portuguese, the name would be spelled Cabrilho. The combination lh in Portuguese is pronounced much like ll in Spanish, that is, like y in English. So the name is not pronounced cah-BRILL-oh in either Spanish or Portuguese.
Yeah, that’s the Upper Midwest. But what’s our excuse in San Francisco for pronouncing “Cabrillo” street “cah-BRILL-oh”?
Damn. The board’s been hanging, but I haven’t seen a four-hour lag between duplicate posts before.
Good point.
Yes, you don’t need a foreign language. We borrowed my dad’s GPS to go to Philadelphia, and it told us we were approaching the “Franklin Branch”. Huh? Oh, it was entered in the database, no doubt, as “Br.” and I bet the street names translator ("by=Bay,“ave=avenue”,“ct=court” etc.) thought it was a street designation not “bridge”.
No, but we sometimes invent words which sound English-ish, or adopt English words because they sound cooler than the Spanish ones to those idiots who think anything foreign is cooler (ex: people used to hacer montañismo, now they hacen mountain-climbing pronounced mountáin clímbin).
The name vueling, an airplane company, is a lampshade: vuelo (flight) + -ing. They don’t pretend it’s English, they make fun of some people’s tendency to drop mispronounced English into every single conversation.
There’s also el parking (for a parking lot) and el camping (for a camp-ground).
My favorite Englishism is chatear for on-line chatting.
Yes! I had forgotten that *jogging *used to be called *footing * or even fúting in Spain when it started to become a popular sport some 40 - 50 yrs. ago. But that was not meant to make fun of the English, they talked like this in earnest.
The name Vueling gets badly on my nerves. I don’t know if they mean it in earnest, if they are making fun of me or calling me and their customers in general an idiot.
Concerning GPS it is hard to beat the annoyance you can feel while navigating in Brussels, where some streets have French names, some have Dutch/Flemish names, some are called after Englishmen (Avenue Churchill, Rond-Point Montgomery)… if you then set your navigator to speak with the Spanish or the German setting it gets surreal.
Yeah. Also we add “-ation” (as in station or ovation) to random words.
It should be noted that Spanish spelling is far more phonetic and consistent than in English.
So with loan words, the question becomes whether you speak the word as in the original language, or write it the same (and therefore pronounce it the way the spelling implies it should be spoken in Spanish).
I’m glad that Spanish does the latter. I don’t speak much Spanish but I would little problem with reading out Spanish text, even including loan words. Whereas, even though I’m English, reading out English text can be a riskier proposition if it’s material with words or proper nouns I’ve never heard spoken before.
My brother in law used to pronounce fajitas as exactly that - with a hard J. He’ll now deny when we remind him of this, or course.
There’s a town in California called El Granada, in which we get not only the pronunciation but the grammar wrong. (I don’t speak Spanish, but I’m told it should be La Granada.)
Wait, what? How is the final “O” supposed to be pronounced?
Dare I ask: if all it takes is an -o or -a, how does fake Spanish differ from fake Italian? Pig Latin I already know sometimes throws in the occasional -ix and -ibus.
In fake Italian you wave your hands around a lot more.
Actually, in fake Italian you add “a,” not “o.” And in fake Spanish, you put “el” in front of everything.
As in “oh!”, not as in “slow”. It’s a SINGLE vowel; one of the greatest pronunciation sins of Anglophone learners of Spanish is adding extra vowels.
Yeah, this is the one I was looking for, at least in Mexican Spanish. I remember a TV commercial many, many years ago, something like, “Regressation Aztecation,” because it was going to be a USA-Mexico game at Estadio Azteca.
But, like per the OP, where we just as “-o” to endings, Mexicans (and maybe others) can add “-ation” to endings.
That’s the same sound for me.