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*sigh* Don't tell Fal, but it's one of my pet peeves.
As Faldo sez, it's OK to have pet peeves. We all do have them., but at some point the language just moves on, and we older speakers are left behind. I collect 19th century (and earlier) usage books and prescriptive grammars. It is fun to see what were the hot pet peeves of many of their authors. To jeopardize is a good example: turns out we should use the verb to jeopard. And, that's why, while it does annoy me when people say things like "To air is human" rather than "to err is human", I just chuckle silently to myself and wonder how language changes in spite of what some of its speakers consciously desire.
Students often complain that Spanish is, get this, "harder than English". Oy. It's obvious they don't know English well (they really don't).
Well, the value of vowels in English is different from most other languages that use the Latin alphabet. This is also complicated by the fact that some of the terminology used by (traditional) grammarians of English is just plain wrong. English does not have phonemic lengthening of vowels. period. Old English did distinguish between long and short vowels (as do German and Dutch), but the long vowels in Old English had the same value as their short corresponding vowels. Not so in English. What we call long vowels are mostly not even vowels, but diphthongs.
But Spanish vowels make learning the language so much easier, because there is only the one set, no long and short. In fact, once they are learned, one can read anything in Spanish, whether one understands it or not, and pronounce every word correctly. Try that in English!
That's what I'm on about. We spend an inordinate amount of time teaching kids how to read because we have a terrible orthography for English. (Mind you, it's not as bad as some; I am currently learning Japanese, and their whole writing system is really much worse.) The down-side to having a sound [no pun intended] phonemic spelling system is, you do not have a need for spelling bees. The only spelling mistakes I've seen in (Mexican) Spanish are confusion of intervocalic b and v *dever or deber 'to owe'.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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old hand
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old hand
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We are so in sync with this, zmjezhd! Perhaps the inventor(s) of Esperanto had that in mind, too.
Other spelling errors arise from dialectical speech. For example, some may write pa for para, or invent a contraction like nay for no hay. I see these in home speakers when they write essays. My non-home speakers make totally different mistakes, such as "Yo lata ir al cine." These are sometimes quite baffling to me, and I have to do a word-for-word literal translation to catch them, and say them out loud as well, and sometimes check a dictionary. I find them very amusing on a boring day... :0)
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"Yo lata ir al cine."I had not heard that before. Spanish latir is in the dictionary in Mexican Spanish use for gustar link).
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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old hand
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Here's what the student wants to say: I CAN go to the movie theater. Here's what they write, and what it really means: Yo lata ir al cine. = I (tin)can go to the movie theater...  What has happened: Student wants to say "I can", looks up "can" in the dictionary, writes down first word seen, ignoring indication that this is a noun...
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But latir (literally 'to beat, pulse') is an auxiliary verb in Chilean and Mexican Spanish. 2. a. (Chi, Méx fam) (parecer) (+ me/te/le etc): me late que no vendrá I have a feeling o something tells me he isn't going to come; b. (Méx fam) (parecer bien, gustar) (+ me/te/le etc): ¿te late ir al cine? do you feel like going to the movies? ( link) Are these students who speak Spanish at home or English-speaking students? I have seen the sort of error, you're talking about, but I'm wondering if the Spanish-speaking students are just using an idiomatic construction. While lata is a noun for 'tin can", it is also the ;present subjunctive form of latir. As I said, I was not familiar with the form, and it's been many years since I studied Spanish, but googling around for lata plus infinitive (e.g., hablar, ir, etc.) gets many hits, and not all of them are from non-native speakers.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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Carpal Tunnel
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the long u (ū), is probably better transcribed as /jʊ:/. (So. it would be a diphthong.) Nah, it just has two syllables!  I am tutoring a boy, approx. 11 years old, who is from Liberia (where English is the official language). He has been in the States four years, he says. I have been interested to note that he of fen will say a word that ends in -ed as two syllables even when it is normally pronounced here in one. As in, They look-ed across the street.
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Carpal Tunnel
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The only spelling mistakes I've seen in (Mexican) Spanish are confusion of intervocalic b and v *dever or deber 'to owe'.
In some dialects of Spanish the differences between B and V in all situations are non-existent. When spelling it is common to say, e.g., "V vaca" or "B boca", pronounced respectively "bay bahkah' and "bay bohkah". The lovely AnnaS and I have a running joke that we drag out every time we drive through Victor, NY, based on a personal experience of AS when she was asked by a native Spanish speaker "Is that bay as in Victor or bay as in Habana?"
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"Is that bay as in Victor or bay as in Habana?"
And for the curious, the phoneme in boca and vaca is not the same as the b or v in English. It is a voiced bilabial fricative /β/ and neither a voiced labio-dental fricative /v/ or a voiced bilabial stop /b/. (It is the voiced counterpart of the f in Japanese futon, /ɸ/.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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Carpal Tunnel
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"Is that bay as in Victor or bay as in Habana?"
And for the curious, the phoneme in boca and vaca is not the same as the b or v in English. It is a voiced bilabial fricative /β/ and neither a voiced labio-dental fricative /v/ or a voiced bilabial stop /b/. (It is the voiced counterpart of the f in Japanese futon, /ɸ/. Depending on your particular dialect of Spanish. In some it is only the intervocalic B/V that is pronounced as Nunc describes. Initial B/V is pronounced much like our initial B. What makes the "bay as in Victor..." line particularly funny is that the V is pronounced like our B and the B (that's how they spell Havana in Spanish) is pronounced something like our V.
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Carpal Tunnel
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that whole b/v thing gives singers fits...
and I'm one who pronounces an h at the beginning of words such as white, and when. I get a lot of crap for that.
this is one of the best threads eber.
formerly known as etaoin...
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