El Castellano Argentino

Dan: I think I’ve gone the last four days without speaking Spanish. Yes, I’m still in Argentina, but I speak English at home, I speak English at work, this blog is in English. I need to find a way to practice more, other than the typical store transactions etc. The other day I was ordering some food at a butcher shop and a woman said,”Your Spanish is very good,” and began to talk to me in English (which led to a job interview at another insitute). I need to figure out how to work on my language a little more. Lulu and I both quit our Spanish classes a couple of weeks ago due to conflicting schedules and the feeling that we weren’t getting much out of them anyway. When we first got here I spoke a lot of Spanish, looking for work, asking people questions, trying to figure things out in Mendoza. I was feeling confindent with my pre-existing Spanish. I also studied on my own quite a bit. Louann has continued to be very self-motivated, crunching away at those irregular verbs. We have some Argentine friends but we only see them every other weekend or so. Now I think my work schedule is becoming more consistent so I need to figure out my own language enrichment plan.

Maybe I should say a little about Argentine Spanish. For one, Spanish isn’t the same wherever in the Spanish-speaking world you go. The vocabulary for things as basic as food items changes from place to place. We always used ‘fresa’, ‘aguacate’ and ‘frijol’ for strawberry, avocado and bean. Here the words ‘frutilla’, ‘palta’ and ‘poroto’ are preferred. Buses = micros, colectivos. Trabajo = laburo. In addition to that, there are all kinds of names for prepared foods. There are names for different types of pasta sauces. Don’t get me started on all the cuts of meat. The word I that always knew meant “bowling alley” was “boliche.” Here, “boliche” means ‘disco’, a place where people dance until 6 AM. I didn’t know this back in March when some tourists from Buenos Aires asked me on the street for directions to a boliche. I pointed them to where I was sure there was a bowling alley. Oops.

There is also a sub-language known as “lunfardo.” These are slang terms that came from the tango culture, I suppose similar to how the jazz culture permeated our language. Cool. The tango culture, coming from the bars and brothels where the dance originated, gave birth to a slang vocabulary that is still used today. The vocab is most evident when people are talking about crime, police, sex or money; you know, everyday stuff.

After leaving Chile, we were relieved to find out that Argentine, or at least Mendocino Spanish is much more intelligible. Santiago Spanish was fast and seemed to be missing a lot of consonants. Buenos Aires Spanish is a little more musical-sounding. Another aspect of Argentine Spanish, an old friend of mine from studying in Costa Rica, is the ‘vos’ form. I’m not even going to bother trying to explain what that means to non-Spanish speakers.The ‘tu’ form is never used. The ‘usted’ form is used very rarely. I think it is seen as putting space between the speakers, but I guess can be used with someone who is much older.

Food: The alfahor is similar in concept to the Oreo cookie. It is a cookie sandwich using sugar cookies. The stuff in the middle is dulce de leche, (caramel-like sugar and milk stuff) but variations have included chocolate and dulce de raspberry. Sometimes they come dipped in chocolate. Sometimes, and I don’t know if it is technically even an alfahor, it is an open-faced cookie sandwich with a cone of dulce de leche, covered in chocolate. A truly amazing confection. The alfahor is the ubiquitous sweet around here. They are sold packaged in little shops, grocery stores, and by guys on street corners at 3 for five pesos. Fancy-pants coffee shops sell freshly made alfahores.

Here are some fancy alfahores brought from Bariloche. One is bathed in white chocolate, the other in chocolate with dulce de frambuesa (raspberry).