BarkellWH -> RE: What is flamenco today? (Oct. 11 2015 23:47:21)
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When I first went to Spain in the early 1960s just about everyone I came in contact with in Andalucia spoke andalú. Not necessarily in the ritzier parts, which I seldom visited on my tight budget, but even there people still distinguished their speech from Castilian, as well as from that of most other people. Fifty years later it no longer surprises me when someone in Andalucia speaks carefully cultivated castellano, but it still catches my ear somehow. Thetas in particular, perhaps because they were absent from the Latin American Spanish I grew up with. Today, on the other side of the International Dateline, it is Monday, October 12, in Palau. It is Columbus Day (an American holiday) and the Embassy is closed, and, being Columbus Day, it set me to reflecting on why Latin American Spanish differs from Castellano. Particularly with regard to the absent theta but in other aspects as well, Latin American Spanish is in some ways closer to Andalu than it is to the Spanish of the Real Academia Espanola and that of Madrid, Central, and Northern Spain. The reason is the Conquistadors such as the great captains Hernan Cortes and Francisco Pizarro came, not from Andalucia but from the adjacent province of Extremadura, as did many of those who followed them and colonized Central and South America. The Spanish dialect spoken in Extremadura is close to that of Southwestern Andalucia. thus, from the beginning Latin American Spanish took on the complexion of that spoken by the Spaniards from Extremadura and Southwestern Andalucia. It would be interesting to know how Castellano was spoken in Madrid in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, at the time the Spanish discovered and began colonizing Latin America. Linguists who study the evolution of languages know that language changes and evolves much more quickly in the metropolitan cities than it does in the rural areas and overseas colonies and former colonies. It is possible that at that time Spanish spoken in Madrid was closer to that spoken in Andalucia than it is today. Maybe not. But it would make an interesting study. Someone may have already done one, but I am not aware of it. Along that same theme of language changing much less in some of the far-flung colonies than it does in the metropole, there are linguists who say that the "purest" Spanish spoken today exists in parts of Colombia. I suppose by "purest" they mean it is closer to the Spanish spoken five hundred years ago, and it must have been that spoken in Estremadura and Southwestern Andalucia, as that is where most of the colonizers came from. Bill
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