Dobleve

Shannon and I recently went to the Dominican Republic for a vacation with my family to celebrate my mother’s 60th birthday.  When I returned home and got a taxi from the train station to our house I was reminded what a crazy language Spanish can be.  The rules for pronouncing words in Spanish are straightforward and have no exceptions, unlike English; practically this means if you read a word you can say it and if you hear a word you can spell it.

In Madrid people generally speak what you’d call “perfect” Spanish, or at least the version of Spanish as defined by the Royal Academy of Spanish, the group that defines the language and new words.  Not surprisingly, when we are in Madrid we feel like we understand everything people are saying to us.

In Andalucia (the region of Spain that Granada is in), people speak a little differently.  In Spanish they say they “come los vocales”, literally “eat the vowels”.  In reality they eat pretty much whatever they want, including “s”’s and any other letter they don’t feel like saying.  You might call this an accent – Spanish has those too – but I don’t think that’s quite right; the sound of words can change pretty dramatically here.

I knew I was home when my taxi driver told his buddy to meet him at Paseo de los Tristes (a small park near our house) after he dropped me off.  Of course he said it like this – “pa-de o-s trees”.  In Madrid they would say “Pass-eh-oh day lows trees-teas”.  If you’re trying that at home and can’t see how they are the same thing then you have an idea of what I’m talking about.