Re: Chilean Spanish (was: Re: Finally)

Sat, 9 Mar 2024 20:51:13 -0000 (UTC): Christian Weisgerber
<naddy@mips.inka.de> scribeva:

On 2024-03-04, Athel Cornish-Bowden <me@yahoo.com> wrote:
>

PS: I started watching _Baby Bandito_ on Netflix.  Chilean Spanish
    turns out to be, uhm, interesting.  Wikipedia has the subject
    covered, of course.

>
Could you expand on that? As it happens Chilean Spanish is the Spanish that I know best, heavily influenced in recent years by Spanish Spanish.

>
The two salient properties are the pronunciation of -s and Chilean
voseo.
>
Coda /s/ is debuccalized to [h] or even deleted completely.

That's not typical of Chile. It also happens in Argentinian, Cuban and
Andalusian Spanish. And propably a lot of other too.

Considering the importance of -s for the Spanish inflectional system,
loss of -s should trigger significant compensatory changes.  That
doesn't really seem to be the case (but see below), so I guess there
is a lot of [h] pronunciation left, even though I have a hard time
hearing it.
>
When people talk to each other, the verb forms are weird.  Okay,
so it's voseo.  Except, it's not.  Well, it is, but not the more
familiar Rioplatense kind.  Chilean comes with its own set of
voseo endings, frequently used with tú as well.  In short:
 -áis > -ái
 -ais > -ai
 -éis > -ís
 -ís  > -ís
That is oddly asymmetric.  Is the final -s of -ís actually pronounced?
Or is this merely an orthographic convention to distinguish it from
the indefinido 1. sg. -í?  The use of -ái/-ai introduces no ambiguity
and compensates for the loss of -s when compared to normal voseo
-ás/-as.

--
Ruud Harmsen, https://rudhar.com