Monthly Archives: June 2024

Fun with “voseo” in Argentina: Part 1

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Dear reader: Once I sat down to write this post I realized that I had plenty to say about voseo as a linguistic phenomenon. So I’ve restricted myself to that topic here. In my next post I’ll actually tell you about my enjoyment of voseo while in Argentina.

My favorite aspect of Argentinian Spanish is voseo, the use of the pronoun vos instead of tú to mean ‘you’ in familiar settings. As a linguist, I appreciate voseo for three reasons.

First, voseo has an amazing history. Argentina, along with certain other regions in Central and South America, retained the archaic vos pronoun while the rest of Latin America followed Spain’s lead in settling on tú. The outcome of tú versus vos in each region depended on the degree of contact between it and Spain during the colonial period. Argentina could not be reached directly, via the Atlantic, because rampant piracy in the Atlantic forced Spain to restrict ocean travel. Spaniards could only reach Argentina by sailing to the Caribbean, crossing the Isthmus of Panama via mule train, sailing to a Pacific port such as Lima, and crossing the Andes. Argentina, like other effectively remote parts of the New World, was thus insulated from linguistic changes back in Spain.

I remember how excited I was to read about this connection between Latin American linguistic history and piracy (!!!) in Ralph Penny’s essential A History of the Spanish Language. It was the subject of my first blog post more than ten years ago, and was one of two linguistic insights that inspired me to write my first book. (The other was my spotting of Jespersen’s Cycle at work in the creation of Spanish negatives, both old and new.)

Second, voseo helps to illustrate that linguistic complexity begets variation. When English speakers begin to study Spanish, they are often taken aback to learn that our single pronoun you corresponds to at least three in Spanish: singular tú (informal) and usted (formal), and plural ustedes. Spain further divides plural ‘you’ into informal vosotros and formal ustedes. As is often the case, the complexity of this aspect of the language is paralleled by extensive dialectal variation: not just vosotros in Spain and vos in parts of Latin America, but also differences in how speakers around the world use tú and usted. For example, Spaniards favor tú over usted in all but the most formal of situations, and in parts of Columbia usted connotes intimacy.

(By the way, two other examples of complexity begetting variation in Spanish are (i) its inventory of seven third person direct and indirect object pronouns (lo, la, los, las, le, les, and se), which has spawned the variant usage patterns of leísmo, loísmo, and laísmo, and (ii) its relative abundance of consonants (17-19, depending on dialect), as opposed to vowels (5), with the result that most phonetic variation in Spanish dialects involves consonants.)

Third — I’m perhaps going out on a limb here — voseo is something that most Spanish speakers are aware of. As a result, you can start an interesting conversation about language differences by asking a Spanish speaker ¿En su país se usa tú o vos? Likewise, you can ask about usage of tú versus usted in their country. I can’t think of any aspect of English grammar that could inspire a parallel discussion. We’re stuck with matter-of-fact questions about vocabulary, such as “Do you say soda, pop, or coke?”

A linguistic “busman’s holiday” in Argentina

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In case you aren’t familiar with the expression, a “busman’s holiday” is a vacation that closely mirrors a tourist’s everyday life. A “busman” (normally one would say “bus driver”) spends a lot of time on the road, so a vacation that involves a fair amount of travel would be more of the same.

Because I’m obsessed with Spanish, my recent trip to Argentina was very much a busman’s holiday. For one thing, during the trip I spoke very little English: only in phone calls home, and with Spanish speakers who wanted to practice their English. My travel buddy Susan and I spoke only Spanish with each other, and I had as many conversations as I could with Argentinians and other Spanish speakers. As a result, my Spanish improved perceptibly during the trip. Immersion works!

My most memorable such conversation took place at the Puerto Iguazú airport, on our way back from seeing the waterfalls. While waiting for our flight I met a Paraguayan civil engineer who was working on a new highway that would bring drivers to the new bridge to Brazil just north of Hito Tres Fronteras (pictured in my previous post). She said something along the lines that “once the bridge and highway are completed, there will be no more traffic.” For a New Yorker raised with the ghost of Robert Moses, the famed builder who never met a stretch of concrete he didn’t like, this was an extreme provocation. One theme of Robert Caro’s classic memoir The Power Builder is that the more roads and bridges Moses built, with the purported aim of decreasing traffic, the worse traffic got. My new friend had never heard of Robert Moses, so this was an exciting conversation for both of us. The Power Broker is now on her English reading list.

Besides the sheer joy of speaking Spanish, the other “busman’s holiday” aspect of my trip was relishing the dialectal features of Argentinian Spanish. As a warmup I devoted some of my free time before the trip to Argentinian fiction. I reread Guillermo Martínez’s La muerte lenta de Luciana B. (2008), which I had found an easy-to-read page-turner years ago. While it was still exciting the second time around, Martínez’s treatment of the title character now struck me as somewhat outdated and sexist. I also read Mariana Enriquez’s truly weird but wonderful novel Nuestra parte de noche (2021), about a sort-of-Satanic cult operating in exactly those parts of Argentina that we were about to visit, namely Buenos Aires and Corrientes province, including Iguazú. During our trip I reread Eduardo Sacheri’s La pregunta de sus ojos (2003), the novel that inspired the 2009 Argentinian movie El secreto de sus ojos and its 2015 English-language adaptation Secret in their eyes. I’ve seen both movies, and the novel is better.

These books reminded me of Argentinian vocabulary like remera for T-shirt and biro (or birome) for a pen. La pregunta de sus ojos in particular featured a near-constant stream of descriptors like boludo ‘imbecile’ and pibe ‘kid.’ Once I arrived in Argentina, local vocabulary was all around me. For example, while texting with our airbnb hostess during my short wait for Susan at the airport I learned to use departamento instead of apartamento and tránsito instead of tráfico.

By the way, these words exemplify a variety of well-known mechanisms of semantic change. Remera is an example of ‘broadening,’ since it originally referred to a shirt worn by a rower (remar means ‘to row’). Biro(me) is an ‘eponym’ that memorializes Ladislao José Biro, the Hungarian-Argentine inventor of the ballpoint pen. Boludo, like English ‘blockhead’, is a metaphorical extension from a shape (bola ’round’) to a personality trait, while pibe was borrowed from Catalan pevet, Portuguese pivete, or Italian pivetto.

As a further “by the way,” Corominas traces the history of pibe from peu (the Catalan word for ‘foot’) to a footed incense holder, to odorous incense, to something with a strong smell, to an infant, to a child. This is as wacky as the evolution of muñeca from ‘milestone’ to either ‘wrist’ or ‘doll,’ yet every step is plausible.

As for as the Argentinian accent, its most salient aspect is probably the lilting intonation that the language has absorbed from Italian (listen at 4:25 here). When I overhear this intonation in the speech of tourists in New York I’m often emboldened me to ask, with a fair rate of success, ¿Son ustedes de Argentina? I didn’t try to adopt this intonation on my trip, but did have fun replacing the usual Spanish glide in words like yo and calle with a harder /dʒ/ or just /ʒ/ consonant, as in ‘Joe’ or ‘pleasure,’ respectively. This is the feature that gave the Argentinian revolutionary Ernesto Guevara the nickname ‘Che.’

My next post will discuss the outstanding feature of Argentinian grammar: voseo.

¡Argentina!

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In March I finally went to Argentina. “Finally” because I’ve wanted to go there for ages, partly for the usual touristic reasons — the country’s culture, natural beauty, and cuisine — but also, as you might guess, to enjoy Argentina’s special variety of Spanish. I’ll write about that in my next post.

I went with my friend Susan R., whom I met through this blog. She is a retired Spanish teacher and an experienced traveler. We hadn’t spent much time together before this trip, but turned out to be highly compatible travel buddies.

Here’s a slideshow about the trip.
I uploaded it as a PDF to sidestep some technical difficulties.

Un-viaje-a-ArgentinaDownload

Argentina is a huge country! Since this was our first visit, Susan and I decided to limit our trip to Buenos Aires and the famous waterfalls of Iguazú, located at the meeting point of Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina. In Buenos Aires we did the normal touristic things, like visiting the tomb of Eva Perón. We took a fantastic tango lesson that ended up with a few hours at a milonga, or dance hall, where porteños (residents of Buenos Aires) go to actually dance, not to just watch a show. We ate a lot of meat (“When in Rome…”), drank a lot of wine, and also enjoyed a lot of top-quality gelato, a testimony to Argentina’s animal husbandry and Italian heritage.

Besides our two-night trip to Iguazú, which was of course spectacular, we made two day trips from Buenos Aires, one to the Tigre Delta, where we enjoyed a boat ride and had lunch on an island, and one to the Uruguayan city of Colonia del Sacramento, on the other side of the Río de la Plata. I would recommend the former though not the latter. Colonia is a pleasant city but not special enough to justify the time it took to cross the river and go through customs in both directions.

Argentina has a perennially troubled economy. While we were there inflation was down somewhat, but there was no question that people were still suffering; we read that over half of Argentinians live below the poverty line. As tourists we were insulated from their hardship, and in fact reaped the silver lining of paying bargain prices for restaurants and lodging. At least we were helping out the economy with an infusion of our American dollars.

Speaking of which, a consequence of Argentinian’s economic chaos is that tourists have to think ahead about how to pay for goods and services. When traveling in Europe I normally pay by credit card almost everywhere, and withdraw cash from a local ATM if necessary. Everything we read and were told about traveling in Argentina told us to bring cash with us, because many businesses don’t take credit cards and ATMS give a terrible exchange rate.

In fact we were able to use our credit cards more than we expected. When in need of Argentinian pesos, to get the more favorable dólar azul rate we exchanged our crisp $100 U.S. bills at cuevas (informal money-changing shops) or Western Unions, or with private individuals we trusted. Our airbnb hostess in Buenos Aires vouched for a gentleman named Pedro, who could always be found outside the café across the street. I have to admit that this was something of a thrill.

The other complication of our trip was mosquitos. There had been a lot of rain before we arrived and mosquitos had multiplied alarmingly. We were forewarned to bring our own insect repellent, since little was left to buy in porteño shops. We gave our leftover repellent to friends of Susan’s as a going-away present.

The main surprise of the trip, at least for me, was how much Argentinians love mate. I knew that this herbal tea is popular in Argentina, but had no idea how omnipresent it is. It was common to see people carrying their mate y bombilla sets outside the home, not just while sharing a drink in a park, but when just walking around the city. Many people also carry a thermos of hot water to refresh their mate after drinking all the liquid. We also saw hot water dispensers for mate, like this one, in public places. There’s even an app you can use to find them.

Apparently the mate leaves release more caffeine every time you add water, so the drink becomes more and more addictive.

Language teachers talk about “Culture with a capital C,” like painting and literature, versus “culture with a little c,” meaning the everyday objects and customs that make life different depending on where you live. Mate is a great example of the latter.