Can Parent and Daughter co-exist?

[Diogo Almeida]

[ moderator re-formatted ]

>	Last summer I showed a Scottish-Nicaraguan movie called Carla's
>Song to my advanced 4th semester Spanish students. While they could
>understand most of the Spanish without relying on the subtitles, except for
>a few cusswords they were completely lost trying to understand the
>Glaswegians. Several students asked me what language they were speaking and
>why they cussed in English instead of their own language.

[ moderator snip ]

>> I once met a couple of fellow hikers on the Appalachian Trail in western
>> North Carolina.  They were from Scotland speaking English.  I was from Utah
>> speaking English.  Yet there was less than 50% mutual comprehensibility.
>> We finally resorted to the common context, hand signals, and a very slowly
>> spoken "Swadesh list" of forms to "communicate".

[ moderator snip ]

This is funny, because it reminds me of my trip to Dublin in last February.
I stayed there in a hostel, and I shared a room with an american girl (from
Chicago) and two spanish guys (from Barcelona).

The situation was interesting: The girl spoke AmE as her mother tongue, but
she was also fluent in Spanish; one of the guys from Barcelona was bilingual
(Spanish and Catalan) and spoke a rather basic English, the other one was
monolingual (Spanish) and spoke English very well; I'm brazilian (and
Brazilian Portuguese is my mother tongue), I'm rather fluent in English and
I had some spanish lessons (something like 6 months) a couple of years ago.

We could all communicate in English and Spanish among ourselves (although in
diferent levels of fluency). What happened, actually, is that I spoke
English with the girl and Spanish with the guys, and when we were all
together we mixed a little bit the two languages.

We were not used to Irish English, though. The american girl could
communicate quite easily with the Irish, the spanish guy that spoke good
English and I had some problems, the other spanish guy couldn't communicate
at all.

Now, whenever the two guys spoke Spanish to me, they'd slow the rythm of
their speech and use less slang, and then I would understand them almost
like I understand Portuguese. But when they were talking naturally between
themselves, my comprehension of what they were saying was much, much lower
(something like 40%, instead of the previous, say, 95-100%). And I must say
that I'm not an average Portuguese-speaking person, that is: I have had some
training in Spanish, I'm fluent in French and I have studied Latin as well.

Once they've all asked me to speak a little Portuguese and I told them
several jokes in Portuguese. When I spoke slowly, they could understand
pretty much what the joke was about, but when I spoke like I normally do in
Portuguese, they couldn't understand a thing of what I was saying, maybe
just one or two words.

I should also say that I think (I'm not 100% sure of it) that it is harder
to a brazilian to undertand Castillian than it is to understand Argentinian
or Uruguaian Spanish. I've been to the border of Brazil with Argentina,
Uruguai and Paraguai, and people down there communicate without any problem.
Even though there is a sort of mixture of the two "languages" there (what we
call "Portuqol"), what I could observe is that Spanish-speakers would speak
Spanish to Brazilians and be understood, and vice-versa.

Diogo Alvares de Azevedo e Almeida