¿Habla Español? Your kids may soon

Fiat money, so wondrous! Would my plans bankrupt the Government so much as that Macy's clerk who proposed the invention of withholding taxes?

BTTT!!!

Ya gotta love reading these threads.

Interesting! How close is Gallego to modern Spanish?

As close as Portuguese is. Galician is the mother tongue of Portuguese. Portugal is directly south of Galicia and Portuguese developed from the Galician brought down by the Reconquista.

I encountered Galician shortly after I first got on the Internet as I was digging through my Galician roots. Anyone who speaks and writes Castillian well and at least tries should be able to muddle through in Galician. I practiced by joining a Galician mailing list and I was soon able to read it pretty well and even tried my hand at writing some posts in it although I could alway fall back on Castillian.

After a while, you see the linguistic evolutions. The Latin "us" was replaced by "o" in both languages. The "e" that was replaced by "ie" in Castellian remained the same in Galician as in "tempo" and "terra". The "f" in Latin words such as "filius" and "formosus" was replaced by the silent "h" in Castillian but retained in Galician. The "li" in Latin evolved into "ll" in Galician but was replaced by "j" in Castilian.

Thus: "filius" , "fillo" , "hijo".

Unlike dying languages such as Welch or Gaellic, both Galician and Catalan are very much in use in their area. During the Franco era, Galician and Catalan were strongly surpressed in order to strengthen the concept of a strong central government out of Madrid with Castillian as the one and only national language. This was in spite of Franco himself being a Gallego.

In Spain itself, Castillians will refer to Castellano as "Español". However, in areas outside of Castille, that goes over as well as the English declaring that "English" will now be called "British". This, of course, would not go over too well in Wales or Scotland who may be "British" but are certainly not %^&$#*@& Englishmen.

Therefore, while in Spain, the diplomatic speaker will refer to "Spanish" as "Castellano".

Now, in post-Franco days, the non-Castillian regions in Spain openly use their ancient languages in government, business and the mass media although non-Castillians all would have Castillian as a common language.

For examples of what Galician is like, here is the Yahoo Spain news section in Galego.

One more thing...As Galicia does have Celtic roots, the Galician folklore is full of witches, spells and "things that go bump in the night" and the music is not the guitars and castanets of southern Spain but........the bagpipes (gaita). Carlos Núñez (see link) even played on tour with The Chieftains.

The Celtic Music of Spain -- Galicia & Asturias

I do, they are my daily drama and comic relief ;)

Y can tell you Dweller, I put my oldest through private school and the two teens have fared much better!

Bottom line is that if you want to sneak into America, there's nothing we can do to prevent it. We can only make it a little harder.

Or, somehow, we start making the rest of the world (but particularly Mexico) think that America is a bad place to live--but preferably without turning it into the New Soviet Union.

Very interesting!