Disclaimer: I understand what you said, but I cannot reply without using babelfish:
Convengo pero diciendo Khan soy más divertido.
Jim
Cut that out. You guys are going to give the Spanish speakers here a headache, if they don’t have one already. 
I’m sorry, I forgot how to do the upside down question mark thingee.
sorry, couldn’t resist. It’s from an old Saturday Night Live skit.
If it makes a difference, I did take 3 years of Spanish in high school, almost 30 years ago. You can see how well it took. 
Bad, but intelligible. Should probably be “Te equivocaste; Lloyd Bridges es un poquito más macho.”
:eek: :eek: “I am advisable but saying Khan I am more amusing”. Think you meant “Estoy de acuerdo, pero es más divertido decir ‘Khan’.”
And yet again, I agree with Colibri.
Ay, lo siento. Y gracias. Mucho tiempo, no Espanol.
Nothwithstanding that I lost interest in lissener long ago and can’t understand why people get so worked up over his nitpickery, I’d like some straight dope. In Spain, is castellano considered a more formal word for espagnol and thus cooler-looking on official documents? Is there a dialect difference? Is castellano a more formal version of the Spanish language? Could someone raised in a strictly castellano household get by on, say, East 104th street? Are such speakers sought out by television and movie studios because they speak in a particularly clear, educated and confidence-inspiring manner, a la Patricio Mayordomo?
[sub]lissener no es macho, es solamente un baraccho…[/sub]
Are you asking if castellano and español refer to different things? No, both are names for a language that most English speakers would call “Spanish”. In some places, “castellano” might be limited to more formal speech, but “español” is used in formal speech as well.
The particular dialect of Castile, also called castellano, is generally treated, particularly in Spain, as the prestige dialect.
I would say “only in Spain” (and I don’t know about that). People who speak Spanish in “the colonies” still don’t sound anything like the Castillians, even if they speak correctly. I don’t see anyone striving to “sound Castillian” around here, in the same way that educated Americans don’t try to sound like the queen of England. Only Spaniards (generally speaking) can tell Castellano from other local varieties of Spanish; to us in the colonies it is all español, but with different accents.
Okay, then. I tried to derive this simple straightforward information from this and the closed thread but it was drowned in (not undeserved) lissener-bashing.
You have the advantage of me, there, MG, in terms of actually living where it is spoken as the dominant language (something that masquerades as "E’pañol pero con todo’ lo’ “S"e’ de’pue’ta’” gets spoken amongst themselves by the immigrant minority around here, but is almost as clear as that pseudo-phonetic representation might suggest). However, I’ve known people from a number of American republics who allege that their national dialect is “Castellano puro” – I cited my first exposure to that, my high school teacher, above. No biggie, but I suspect it’s a national/regional usage issue.
Yeah, you’re extremely right about that - I clearly implied that the Castilian dialect is some sort of model in Latin America, and that’s not the case. I’ve never heard, for instance, of Latinos deliberately pronouncing C and Z on the Castilian model, nor of any attempts to revive the second person plural.
I believe that is correct. I also withdraw the claim of cowardice. But what **lissener ** really needs is more brains and heart rather than of balls.
He also sent me a couple of e-mails early in the course of this thread, which I only read yesterday because my board e-mail address is one I only check every couple of days. They are what caused me to change my opinion of lissener’s motives, and prompted my earlier post. While he didn’t say anything in them that he hasn’t said in the thread as well, it was clear that he wasn’t just playing to the crowd, but actually believed what he had been saying. I haven’t responded to them, since the last thing I want is to get into some prolonged exchange of e-mails with someone like lissener.
Lissener seems to want to be respected on the board, but clearly has no idea about how to go about earning it. In this thread, pretty much everyone who responded to it before lissener’s first post agreed with my OP. Any rational person, and anyone with any experience of the Pit, would have known that responding to this thread with the EXACT behavior for which he had been just been pitted was just not going to fly. Yet lissener did it anyway.
I would like to mention how pleased I am that this thread has largely stayed on point. It has mainly addressed the specific facts under dispute, and specific aspects of **lissener’s ** behavior on the board. Despite lissener’s accusations, people have generally not used it as an excuse to just hurl insults or to heap abuse on him about unrelated transgressions. Few if any have criticized him without explaining the reasons for their opinions. While abuse has sometimes been heaped, it has been for actions or attitudes that are clearly related to lissener’s transgressions in the original thread and this one. Given the level of animosity that lissener has earned (and I use the word advisedly) in other threads, and knowing how Pit Threads can go, I think this is rather remarkable.
Don’t blame yourself, it us us, native Spanish-speakers who perpetuate this myth. All over Latin America you hear people claiming that they speak ‘castellano puro’. By this they don’t mean that they speak like present-day Castillians but that they speak the mythical, pure, ancient Spanish spoken by the Conquistadors. We equate ‘archaic’ with ‘pure’, and that is not the case. Nobody in this day and age speak like Columbus, and even though many agree that the Spanish spoken in the Caribbean still uses the most archaic words, we have to accept that this doesn’t make us any better at speaking the language, and would probably make it more difficult to communicate with other Spanish-speakers that have long abandoned this words and constructions.
When you hear somebody talk about “castellano puro” just laugh a little, I don’t believe there is such thing.
I had this impression that the Spanish of Castile was treated as a literary model; it was upon reading your post and trying to come up with examples of it that I realized I couldn’t. I can’t really think of any dialectal features - word choices, stuff like leísmo, and so on - that are imitated in Latin American writing.
Whereas in, for instance, Brazilian Portuguese, the written style that’s taught in schools is closely modeled on European Portuguese, and it’s vastly different than actual spoken Brazilian Portuguese (in, for instance, it’s use of the European system of second person pronouns as opposed to the wacky Brazilian system.)
Can I ask you something that I’ve been wondering ever since I figured out where you live? What’s your first language? I had always sort of assumed you moved to the Caribbean from the U.S. since your English has always appeared letter perfect to me, but you mentioned a sister who grew up speaking Spanish. Did you learn English as a second language, or did you move to the Dominican Republic from the U.S., or what?
Heh! That is flattering, in a way.
I am a native Dominican and have lived here all my life (except for three months I spent in Puerto Rico on a long vacation). I learnt English in school, French in the Alliance Française (so did my sister) when I was a teenager.
:dubious: So you know, dropping the S is utterly common throughout Latin America (as discussed here, and I’m willing to bet a large percentage of Mighty_Girl’s countrymen speak this way. I also (usually) drop the S, but that’s because most of the people with whom I speak Spanish (Cubans and Dominicans, mostly) do so as well. It is not a dialect masquerading as Spanish, but rather a very common feature among Spanish speakers. It isn’t so hard to understand once you’re used to it.
Please don’t take this as anything other than a gentle correction. I have nothing but the utmost respect for you and for your knowledge.
Also, Excalibre – thank you for your contributions to this thread. Linguistics and the history / development of languages have always fascinated me, and I love to read your essays on the topics whenever you post. I know very little about the history of the two languages I speak, but I’m always interested. I learned a lot reading your posts in this thread and in many others, and for that I thank you.
It’s yet another trait of Latin American Spanish that started in southern Andalucía - and yes, it’s common in all sorts of places in Latin America. Sometimes the /s/ is aspirated to an /h/ sound, so you end up with “ehperar” and “Ehpaña” and so forth; other times the /s/ is entirely dropped. Particularly well-known as a Caribbean thing, but I first heard it in Cádiz, which is in the very south of Spain.
There’s a joke I heard once, which I’ll probably butcher in my retelling since I don’t remember it well.
A little Cuban boy says to his mother, “Today in school we’re going to learn about plurals. Mamá, how do you make a word ‘plural’?”
“Oh, that’s easy, mijo. Just add an S. El coco, lo coco.”
Well, it amused me anyways.
Aww, thanks! 
:o