Tuesday, January 29, 2008
DARIO 1: thougths on culture
Throughout the past couple of weeks we have been talking about different Spanish speaking cultures. In chapter one we discovered many cognate words between English and Spanish. Some of these words are importante, persona, and perdon. Cognate words are one way that the non-Spanish speakers can connect to the Hispanic culture. When speaking to my friend that has family from Spain and my other friend with family from Mexico, there is a difference in some of the words and phrases used between the two families. Although Spanish is spoken in many countries, each country also have their own twist to the language and the way it is used.
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Spanish has many variations in the way that it might be spoken in a different country. An example of this took place in the video that we viewed in class. The video demonstrated five spanish speaking students and their professor sharing and speaking the same language yet the language seemed to differ depending on where the person was from. The students were from all different spanish speaking countries such as Argentina, Mexico, Columbia, Spain, and Puerto Rico and because of their geographical differences the changes in words such "bus" for them was apparent.
It is similar in the way that english, here, in the United States would be spoken differently then the way that english would be spoken in England. Slang terms usually are not the same and for some similar items different names may be given. Adding a twist to the same language.
In class we learned that some countries have different importance placed on meals. In America, lunch is a small meal and dinner is the big meal. In spanish countries, lunch means a big meal while dinner means a smaller meal. We place much more of an importance on our dinner in America and people label it as being the family meal.
Greetings and formal/informal are a lot more important in the latin cultures. They greet each other more respectfully and are more affectionate. You can offend someone pretty easily by not using a small word like usted or even forgetting to change tu to se when greeting someone. It seems that the latin cultures are just more bent on respect compared to our casual greeting and the fact that nobody is raise to say sir or ma'm anymoe.
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