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Posts: 797
Joined: Jun. 1 2010
From: Halifax, Nova Scotia
Jaleo Identification/Translation
Sorry for this stupid thread, but I'm very curious. I've been watching a lot of Rito y Geografia and Puro y Jondo videos, and I keep hearing this one Jaleo that sounds like "ohmygod" - can someone identify and translate this for me?
RE: Jaleo Identification/Translation (in reply to El Kiko)
Can't resist a linguistic discussion!
In Spanish, generally, either the letter 'b' or 'v' is pronounced like a 'hard b' at the beginning of a word (like 'b' in English); other places (e.g. between vowels), they are both pronounced the same - a 'soft b' - vibrating between two lips; crucially not like an English 'v' (which involves upper teeth and lower lip). This soft-b is often barely audible, so the sound can almost go away altogether.
However, in rapid speech, you can get the soft-b sound at the start of a word, which would make 'vamos alla' sound like 'amo alla'
There is a lot of confusion over things written 'b' versus 'v', and the Royal Academy has taken various stances over the past few centuries - are they the same? different? They now say they are the same, recognizing the reality of the language and not a fantasy of how things maybe 'should' be.
In linguistic terms, both letters represent the same phoneme with voiced bilabial stop and voiced bilabial fricative allophones. For this reason, speakers need to memorize which words are written with 'b' and which with 'v', leading to spelling errors.
Posts: 15725
Joined: Dec. 14 2004
From: Washington DC
RE: Jaleo Identification/Translation (in reply to granjuanillo)
quote:
There is a lot of confusion over things written 'b' versus 'v', and the Royal Academy has taken various stances over the past few centuries - are they the same? different? They now say they are the same, recognizing the reality of the language and not a fantasy of how things maybe 'should' be.
"no te vayas" never sounds like "no te bye ass" to me but maybe I am wrong, depends who says it. Also things like 'Cordoba" sound like "cordoVa" to my ears....so I often look to just swap letters sometimes, sometimes not when pronouncing...based on what I perceive I am hearing or have heard in the past. Abril=avril...Sara Varas....Maria Bargas....Bicente Amigo...estevan....Beronica...Bolar... those are swaps...but Buleria or Bueno or Bendita sound normal.
RE: Jaleo Identification/Translation (in reply to Ricardo)
There are two separate things going on:
(i) the soft-b sound in Spanish is not the same as the English 'v' - in English, 'v' is made with the lips and the teeth; the Spanish sound, is is made with both lips, slightly vibrating (a 'fricative' - i.e., involves friction). Since English doesn't have this sound, English speakers tend to hear it as a 'v' sound. Also some American Spanish speakers (e.g. some second generation Latinos) may sometimes use an English 'v' pronunciation (this has been reported in the literature).
(ii) There is no difference between what is written 'b' vs 'v' in Spanish (at least Standard Spanish, there is some dialect variation, see above). Both are sometime pronounced as 'hard-b' (like and English 'b' - the air is stopped and then released - hence, the term 'stop'), and sometimes as the soft-b sound described above. This depends on the context:
(a) at the beginning of a word or an utterance, you tend to get the hard-b
(b) in the middle of a word (usually, particularly between vowels) you get the soft-b; when words come together, as in 'Sara Baras', the 'B' tends to act like it is between vowels.
Again there is a certain amount of individual and dialect variation here, but this is the general pattern.
Printable Version
- can someone identify and translate this for me? 
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