This is perhaps my last post in this thread as my posts are already quite numerous, controversial (every time I post on the forum
), and this discussion can only lead to nowhere. As I wrote in my first post, it all "depends" on what we me by "to understand" and the type of speech we have in mind. Also, a detailed explanation of my personal viewpoint would costs me a lot of time and effort (especially writing this in English).
But, I just must respond to this:
Kullman wrote:Let me stress this. There are uruguayans working in every spanish country, and we all understand them perfectly.
Yes, you are right and yes, quite obviously you're telling us the truth.
HOWEVER, your argument is weak and misleading.
I've met several native speakers of Spanish (mostly Colombians) living abroad... And this is my experience:
I met a Colombian girl who had lived 10 years in Mexico, and had just recently came back Colombia. (1) Her speech was strikingly clear--it may be really, really hard to meet a Colombian speaking a so amazingly clear way unless he/she is some kind of a TV presenter. (2) BUT, neither her pronunciation, nor the vocabulary she used were Colombian. She abundantly used Mexican words, and her pronunciation was Mexican for the most part. More interestingly, she was completely UNAWARE of speaking Mexican Spanish. We were arguing (rather hard) as after having spent 10 years in Mexico she so firmly believed that her accent was "Colombian and neutral". Finally, I made a phonetic transcription of a piece of her speech based on a recording and showed her, sound by sound, consonant by consonant, vowel by vowel, how her speech compares to that typical of her original town in Colombia and that of Mexico City. For the most part, her pronunciation was neither "Colombian" nor "neutral" or anything like that but simply Mexican...
And she was amazed to discover that!
I met another Colombian girl, who had lived for about 6 years or so in Uruguay, studying at the university. Once again, her speech was anormally clear and clearly non-Colombian. And once again, for whatever reason, she firmly believed she spoke Colombian. I think either (a) she was so proud of being Colombian that she couldn't admit her accent was no longer Colombian or (b) she was seriously unaware of the sounds coming out from her mouth. That girl had a strong character so that there was little to no place for discussion about whether or not her accent was Colombian...
Despite I can distinguish between twenty or more regional accents from different parts of Colombia, I would never ever identify her speech as Colombian. Her speech was
very clear, but so odd, I'd be unable to guess was continent she was from...
I met another Colombian... Living in Poland. I don't remember how many years she had spent in Poland when I met her, but she was living with a Cuban and working for Spaniards in some kind of a Spanish restaurant. In contrast to the first two girls from this story, that one was perfectly aware of no longer speaking Colombian.
I remember she had fun talking with me because, as she said,
"I was using words from her childhood"--Colombian words she no longer uses, words which are not understood by Cubans and Spaniards. I've never talked to her boss but I can easily imagine her boss saying "We are working with Colombians and Cubans, here in Poland, and we
perfectly understand each other."
These three Colombians LEARNT to speak a clear, unnatural way non-Colombians can understand without effort. If you say
"Let me stress this. There are uruguayans working in every spanish country, and we all understand them perfectly.", what does it really prove
On the contrary, in at least several occasions, I talked with native speakers of Spanish complaining about their inability to understand the spoken language from other regions. Mexicans having problems in Chile or a Venezuelan
having lots of problems in Spain during the first several months--some of the examples coming to my mind.
The reality about Spain is not that an average Spaniard
perfectly understands the speech of Uruguay. The reality is that an average Spaniard cannot even distinguish between Uruguayans, Paraguayans, etc., and has virtually no linguistic knowledge of any kind. Even worse, in Spain, many (most?) people call Mexicans "South Americans".
But the linguistic situation is more complex. I once worked in a scientific project in a Uruguayan-Brazilian team; I was the only team member coming from Europe (Poland). We communicated generally via e-mail without the use of English--everyone was writing in his/her own language: Brazilians in Portuguese, Uruguayans and me in Spanish. We were discussing scientific things and the like and believe me or not, that multilingual communication was perfect.
I'd even say I can understand a spoken Portuguese without much effort as long as the speech is "clear".
This may look contradictory but one hand I can defend the thesis that distant dialects of Spanish may be hardly understood and on the other had I can understand Portuguese and Italian, which are considered separated languages
Because everything just DEPENDS, depends on the definitions, depends on the kind of speech, etc.