Posted on 02/03/2024 3:30:16 AM PST by Libloather
You are correct!
The left’s mission in life is to upend the status quo.
Fixing what ain’t broken is their expertise, and inevitably succeed in breaking what wasn’t broken.
They used to call it Spanglish. (I typed Spanglish and it didn’t register as wrong so the word is in our vocabulary).
A few of these types of markers from many immigrant groups make it into the host language; others become extinguished, or are characterized as folklore. My grandparents, both born here from immigrants, used traces of Irish and Scottish.
As one example, the great Scottish migration to the U.S. in the 1840s inserted the letter "a" before a verb to signify the immediate future, or that you are presently doing the act: "I'm a-going to the house." In today's vernacular, we would say, "I'm going to go to the house" or "I'm going to the house right now." You can hear this usage in old-time songs from the colonial to Civil War era.
It is exactly what I thought of when seeing the title of the article.
Because the people who invented it and who teach and revere its greatest writers speak it so much better than we do. Even casual chats with Brits on a street corner are full of wit and articulation.
I'm not talking about decyphering the regional accents or temporary idioms, but the compound sentences and verb tenses and sheer fluency of great English speakers. Listen to Margaret Thatcher to the UK House of Lords, Nigel Farage to the European Union parliament or Boris Johnson giving a talk about Western Civ, and feel bested.
Italian-American neighborhoods of New York, New Jersy and Philly have the same phenomenon—you got a taste of it in The Sopranos. Garrison Keillor made many linguistic references to the Scandanavian culture of the upper Midwest in his Lake Woebegon programs (before he got cancelled by #MeToo). Some of the funniest send-ups of local cultures were SNL's imitations of Irish Bostonians with Amy Poehler and Jimmy Fallon, Chicago Bears fans with Chris Farley and Bob Smigel, and "The Californians" with Fred Armisen, Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig.
“I’m not talking about decyphering the regional accents or temporary idioms”
I was.
I still remember my grandmother. who lived in Florida, complaining about all the Cubans there, fleeing Castro back in 1959.
Down South we say, “I’m fixin’ to go to the house.”
I thought that too.
Interestingly, my girlfriend from Philippines uses some of these same constructions (heavy Spanish influence there).
That may well be, but during the aftermath of the great Scottish migration to the Appalachias and southeast, y'all would have said, "I'm a-fixin' to go to the house."
“Government Tagalog is way different from Ilocano or other Visaya dialects.”
My GF and her family are from the south and central: Davao and Cebu City. I can’t understand Tagalog but she has taught me all of 3 or 4 words!
And she taught me how to pronounce “Tagalog”, in English! (Emphasis on second syllable).
Um ... okay ... Felicidades, Alex y José.
Those cuban girls love it when a gringo flirts with them in Spanish.
“Those cuban girls love it when a gringo flirts with them in Spanish.”
Like when some Norte romantically whispers, “Cuanto por la noche?”
A lot of the phrasing involves the use of pronouns, which is very quirky in many languages. I’m sure I say things in Spanish that sound similar to the phrases the article mentions in English.
My favorite speech mannerism of hers is “make ready” where I would say “get ready” or “get dressed”. Another one is “I’m going to fix the bedroom” where I would say “pick up the bedroom” or “clean up the mess”.
“Haz listo.” My father would say “make ready,” and he was a native of Missouri, so you just never know.
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