Chatear. To chat, with a cup of coffee or a cerveza fría (cold beer), is charlar, conversar, hablar. In Mexico and areas under Mexican linguistic influence (parts of Central America, the American South West, for example) they use platicar.
Chatting, as in IM, or IM-ing (IM-ing is like whispering, perfect for furtive, racy exchanges—or slimy, perverted ones, as New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd put it) is chatear.
Whispering = susurro, murmurar.
Furtive = furtivo, stealthy.
Racy = picante, subido de color, sexy.
Exchange = intercambio.
Slimy = Fangoso (muddy), baboso (mucous).
Instant message = Mensaje instantaneo (MI). Spanish-language servers offer: Chatear en tiempo real. But that’s not Spanish, purists complain. That’s nothing but that hybrid, that bastard dialect Spanglish (espanglish in Spanish, notice that languages are not capitalized in Spanish). Well, if you ask Amherst College professor Ilan Stavans, Spanglish is a new language, and, said Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, only dead languages remain uncontaminated. A purist even threatened me physically for defending Spanglish. I had to remind him Castilian borrowed the word ESPAÑOL from the Provencal. Castilian for Spanish until the 11th century was españón.
By the way, speaking of beer, Ernest Hemingway needed three expressions to get by in the Spanish-speaking word: Una cerveza, dame un beso, and llama a mi abogado.
Dame = give me.
Beso = Kiss.
Llama = call.
Abogado = lawyer.
A: The original Roman Calendar had ten months, Martius, “ March,” marzo, the first month, Mars’ month; Aprilis, “April,” abril, the second month, Aphrodite’s month; Maius, “May,” mayo, the third month, Maia’s m
onth; Junius, “June,” junio, the fourth month, Juno’s month; Quintilis or Julius, “July,” julio, the fifth month, Julius Caesar’s month; Sextilis, “ August,” agosto, the sixth month, Augustus Caesar’s month; September, “September,” septiembre, the seventh month; October, “October,” octubre, the eighth month; November, November, noviembre, the ninth month; December, “December”, diciembre, the tenth month.
Around 700 BC, Roman King Numa Pompilius added two more months: Januarius, “January,” enero, the month of Janus, the God of the two faces, one looking back to history, the other forward to the future; and Februarius, “February,” febrero, the month of purification. Numa Pompilius moved the beginning of the year from March to January, misrepresenting our tenth month with the name of the eighth, the ninth with the seventh, the eleventh with the ninth, and the twelfth with the tenth.
Neither days nor months are capitalized in Spanish.
onth; Junius, “June,” junio, the fourth month, Juno’s month; Quintilis or Julius, “July,” julio, the fifth month, Julius Caesar’s month; Sextilis, “ August,” agosto, the sixth month, Augustus Caesar’s month; September, “September,” septiembre, the seventh month; October, “October,” octubre, the eighth month; November, November, noviembre, the ninth month; December, “December”, diciembre, the tenth month.Around 700 BC, Roman King Numa Pompilius added two more months: Januarius, “January,” enero, the month of Janus, the God of the two faces, one looking back to history, the other forward to the future; and Februarius, “February,” febrero, the month of purification. Numa Pompilius moved the beginning of the year from March to January, misrepresenting our tenth month with the name of the eighth, the ninth with the seventh, the eleventh with the ninth, and the twelfth with the tenth.
Neither days nor months are capitalized in Spanish.
Q: Does bipolar have a psychiatric connotation in Spanish or is it just a geographic denomination?
A: According to the DRAE (Diccionario de la Real Academia Española) bipolar means having to poles. Earth has the Polo Norte and Polo Sur.
The psychiatric condition, bipolarity, in Spanish greatly depends on socioeconomics. For those less fortunate, the genetic loco (crazy) applies. As we move up in life, loco becomes emocionalmente inestable, emotionally unstable. If we are talking about a ranking member of society, someone with a direct influence on your paycheck, we say Don Pedro tiene sus altibajos (Don Pedro has his ups and downs), fluctuating from apatía, apathy, to euforia.
Medical interpreters say maniaco-depresivo for bipolar. Increasingly in urban settings, people use bipolar, stress on the last syllable.
What is Chat in Spanish?
Q: Is it possible to master a language without structure? A: No, but language structure is simple. Better yet, according to MIT linguist Noam Chomsy, the brain comes with a universal language processor. This universal processor sets limits on the structure most languages have, making them similar. Chomsky studied word-arrangement in sentences, and discovered that most languages favored a small common grammatical structure, a subject-verb-object combination: Ella (she-subject) va (goes-verb) a Mexico (to Mexico-complement). Even less simple combinations, using relative clauses, for example, tended to look the same. El hombre que ella llama es el padre (the man that she calls is the father).
Español|an irreverent and encyclopedic approach to effective communications in Spanish. Beginners/Intermediate. ON SALE Sep. 15.
The man that she calls is the father and el hombre que ella llama es el padre show proper syntax (the word arrangement makes sense.) It would have been just as easy to say, using the same words, ‘she man the is calls father’ making no-sense.
Observing that children learn languages rapidly, Chomsky theorized that human beings must share at birth some innate capacity to learn from hearing only a small number of sentences and basic grammar to transform these sentences into new combinations. He wrote that when a mother teaches a sentence to a child she doesn’t have to explain its grammatical components. The child knows the combination of sounds that makes sense, he knows how the words fit together.
Following this train of thought, if you master a total of 40 words, including nouns, verbs and basic function words, by the power of combination, you can create thousands of sentences. For example: Una aventura romántica es ideal, el ideal es una aventura romantica, un ideal romantico es una aventura. Aventura, by the way, means adventure, as in a risky endeavor like a trip to an exotic land, but also an affair of the heart, as in a I am having an affair with my personal trainer (tengo una aventura con mi entrenador).
Q: While English and Spanish share a similar structure, are there syntactical differences?
A: The position of adjectives is one. Adjectives precede nouns in English: wonderful country. In Spanish adjectives (los adjetivos) follow the nouns they quialify: país maravilloso. Another difference is the position of object pronouns. In English they go after the verb: I buy a book or I buy it. I see María or I see her. In Spanish, object pronouns precede verbs: yo compro un libro, but yo lo compro. Yo veo a María, but yo la veo.
Another difference is the present tense. Spanish and English have two ways of expressing the present: yo hablo (I speak), and estoy hablando (I’m speaking.) Yo hablo is equivalent to I speak, I do speak, do I speak, and I’m speaking. Yo hablo, thus, is favored over yo estoy hablando, limited to the moment the subject speaks. Yo hablo (the present tense), like English, also expresses the future: Yo hablo mañana (I’m speking tomorrow.) Since the present continuous (estoy hablando) connotes an act in process, it can never be used to express the future. If a friend asks what you are doing in the evening? It is incorrect to say yo estoy teniendo una cena con un amigo esta noche (I'm having ...). The proper way to express the future action is yo tengo una cena con un amigo esta noche.
[Excerpted from Español|an encyclopedic and irrelevant approach to language learning.]
