Tag Archives: Buenos Aires

Fun with “voseo” in Argentina: Part 2

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The street map below, which I saw on a downtown Buenos Aires signpost, captures the linguistic “Alice in Wonderland” vibe I experienced on my recent trip to Argentina. The VOS ‘you’ in the yellow box south of the Plaza de Mayo on the map was intended as a “You are here” location marker. However, as I explained in my previous post, voseo — the use of vos instead of standard Spanish tú — is a hallmark of Argentinian Spanish, as well as certain other Latin American dialects. So to me, this map told me that “I was here” linguistically — in the heartland of voseo — as well as geographically.

I was accustomed to seeing vos and its associated verb forms in Latin American novels, but spotting and hearing them ‘in the wild’ was a real thrill throughout my trip. As soon as I arrived at Buenos Aires’s Ezeiza airport I saw posters like the ones below, whose vos command forms tell the traveler to ‘connect yourself’ with WiFi, and ‘tempt yourself’ with the airport’s delicious food.

Later in my trip I was tickled pink to glimpse this large “VOS” featured on a branch office of the insurance company “La Segunda.” (I snapped this cell phone picture through a taxi window, hence the funny angle.) Its slogan Lo primero sos vos ‘You are first’ tells customers that they are the company’s top priority.

Although I’ve known about voseo forever, I had never had a good reason to actually learn the relevant forms. So before my trip I gave myself a crash course. I was surprised to see that in most cases, the only distinction between standard Spanish tú forms and their corresponding vos forms is stress. Specifically:

  • In standard Spanish, present tense tú forms like amas ‘you love’ and comes ‘you eat,’ as well as informal (tú) command forms like ¡Ama! ‘Love!’ and ¡Come! ‘Eat,’ all stress the next-to-last syllable. Because this is the standard stress pattern for Spanish words that end in a vowel or s (think cuchara and cucharas), they are written without an accent mark.
  • Vos forms display the opposite pattern. As illustrated by present-tense amás and comés, and commands ¡Amá! and ¡Comé!, these words are stressed on the last syllable, and therefore require a written accent mark.

As soon as I saw the Conectate and Tentate posters illustrated above, I realized that the final stress on vos commands further complicates an already challenging topic in Spanish: the use of accent marks in command forms with pronouns.

  • In standard Spanish, the next-to-last stress of tú commands like ¡Ama! and ¡Come! is heard in formal and plural affirmative commands as well (¡Ame! ¡Amen! ¡Coma! ¡Coman!). In written Spanish, when you add a pronoun to any of these commands, you must also add an accent mark to maintain stress on what is now the third-to-last syllable. Some examples are informal ¡Cómelo! ‘Eat it!’, formal ¡Levántese! ‘Get (yourself) up!’, and plural ¡Escríbanles! ‘Write (to) them!’
  • In contrast, because vos commands are stressed on the last syllable (e.g. ¡Conectá!), adding a pronoun means that you can drop the accent mark, since the stressed syllable is now in the usual next-to-last position (¡Conectate!).
  • This means that Argentinians need to add an accent mark when adding pronouns to formal and plural commands like ¡Levántese! and ¡Escríbanles!, but remove an accent mark when adding a pronoun to informal (vos) commands like ¡Conectate!.

This situation is guaranteed to confuse anyone but a linguist! Not surprisingly, many Argentinians (incorrectly) omit the accent mark in formal commands with pronouns because they are used to doing this in informal commands. (I don’t know what the situation is with plural commands, which are less common.)

Below are two examples of such errors from our trip to Igauzú. The seatback airline safety instructions on the left omitted the accent mark on abróchese ‘buckle.’ (As you can see, I added it with a pen mid-flight, in the spirit of Deck and Herson’s self-righteous but inspirational The Great Typo Hunt.) Likewise, the informational panel on the right, from the Iguazú waterfall park, omitted the accent mark on acérquese ‘approach.’ Note that the safety instructions and the informational panel correctly accented cinturón, más, and información, implying that the missing accent marks on the commands were a sign of weakness in grammar rather than an overall spelling deficit. The missing accent mark on the subjunctive verb form esté (which I also wrote in myself) supports this conclusion.

Finally, I can’t help but ask: since tú verb forms, which are mostly used in the Northern hemisphere, have the opposite stress pattern from and vos forms, which are mostly used in the South, could this possibly have something to do with the Coriolis effect?

Just joking!

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.