Re: Chilean Spanish (was: Re: Finally)

On 2024-03-09 20:51:13 +0000, Christian Weisgerber said:

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.

Exactly right. One would say lo[h] Chileno[] hablan castellano muy bien though someone from Spain might say los Chilenos hablan castellano muy malo.

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.

I've never noticed any sort of voseo in any of the sort of people I talk to in Chile (or at home for that matter). Health permitting, we hope to be in Chile in October, so I'll be on the lookout for voseo.
--
Athel cb