Silas, a 10th-grader in Madison, Wisconsin, is working on his own conlang, or constructed language. He wonders how and why the French uvular R sound, as in the French word rouge, came about, as opposed to the rolled Spanish R in carro. As Trask’s Historical Linguistics (Bookshop|Amazon) notes, this sound continues to spread throughout eight European languages in what’s called a phonemic shift. Western European languages have a coronal R formed along the alveolar ridge at the front of the mouth. Around the 17th or 18th century, this uvular R developed as a characteristic of the speech of the elite, and as such, was increasingly imitated. This is part of a complete episode.
Why do some Spanish speakers use adaptations of certain English terms when there’s already a perfectly good word for the same thing in Spanish? Sometimes the result is called “Spanglish.” For example, Spanish cuentas means “bills,”...
We’ve previously discussed when pigs fly and other idioms expressing profound skepticism that something will occur. That prompted an email from Guillermo in Tucson, Arizona, who shared a Spanish phrase that conveys a similar idea: cuando la...
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