Argentinian Spanish

I´ve got nothing to do, its pissing down, the visibility is three feet and its cold. Why am I in Patagonia again? Well now seems the best time for that brief examination of the local version of Spanish I promised. Given I speak about three words this will be somewhat brief.

 As you can imagine the old Español has mutated somewhat in its time down here, you only need to look at American English to realise that some sort of mutation was inevitable. Its how its mutated that is if not interesting, then confusing and at times dangerous..

When I took a Spanish for tossers course a few years back I was told that the word for Spanish was Español, well in Argentina Spanish is Castellano (I sense colonial sensitivities here), sandwich was boccadillo, here the word for sandwich is, er, sandwich. draught beer is chopp cerveza (sometimes it is even called chopp birra), potatoes are not patatas but papas. So what I hear you cry none of this should cause any problems.

Well not those words, but consider the verb coger: which in Spain is used to say pick up, fetch or catch, as in catch a bus: coge un autobus. Well in Argentinian Spanish goger means  to fuck. I´m sure you are now juxtaposing all sorts of words with coger that provide hilarious results, but to help you ´ll give you the Spanish word for seashell, concha. Innocent enough in Europe, but down here it means c**t.  Can you guess why no females in Argentina are called Conchita?.

Throw in the different pronunciations: y is prounounced sh, ll is prounounced sh, in fact a whole lot of consononts seem to be pronounced sh, except for sh itself, which is pronounced s.

These are some of the mines that I´ve uncovered in less than two week, God knows what other ordanance is out there. In short unless you are fluent dont bothere so I dont. Habla Inglese anyone: that means Do you speak English. I think.

Its now time to talk about town planning, well actually it isn´t but Howard asked me about the Argentinina version, well they are just as fucking useless as they are in Scotland. Consider the town I´m in now Bariloche. This has a wonderful setting at the side of a lake looking out to majestic mountains. Well the planners have put in a byepass seperating the town from the lake. Fort William anyone?