Prentiss Riddle: Language

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Se habla vosotros

AISD and The Long Center just distributed a "Passport to the Arts" booklet to all K-12 students listing performing arts organizations and events around town. Its cover proudly says ¡Ahora en Español también! What it doesn't say is that it's the Spanish of Madrid, not México. Every page has just one line in Spanish:

O para información en español, llamad 555-1212 o visitad nuestra pagina de internet en www.blablabla.org.

Oops! That llamad and visitad are the vosotros form, or second-person informal plural, a grammatical item which crossed the Atlantic only in copies of the Quixote and selected Almodóvar movies. I suppose we're expected to call for informaTHión, too.

I'm not sure which is more embarrassing, translating official English into the orthographically challenged and heavily anglicized Spanglish which is the norm around here, or translating it into snooty old-world Spanish which nobody in Texas has spoken since Cabeza de Vaca.

(P.S. They also misspelled página.)

language 2003.09.09 link