We talk about what separates us with the language that unites us

An illustration with the variety of words in Spanish.

The lexical diversity between the different varieties of Spanish barely reaches 2%, but all Spanish speakers love to use the remaining 98% to talk about it.

And in any of those conversations, even if they started with business or world politics, we will end up dealing at some point about how this or that is said there or here.

These differences can be divided into four groups, for which examples we will go to a simple representative sample (completeness is feasible in dictionaries, but impossible in an article of limited length):

1. Foreign words that are understood because they are related.

That is, the words that one of the interlocutors does not recognize as part of her usual lexicon but understands perfectly, especially since he is able to look inside the word and deduce its chromosomes;

that is, the genetics that composed that term.

A Mexican will not bathe in a "pool", but surely he will know what his Argentine interlocutor is referring to when he proposes to swim in it for a while, because he knows the words "pila" or "pilón" as water containers.

And if a Colombian tells him that he was delayed due to a “trancón”, he will take charge of what that word means because he will know how to relate it to “tranco”, “trancar”, “tranquera” or “trancazo”, terms that evoke the fact that something prevents the passage.

In the same way, it will be easy to understand the equivalent meanings of “tamponamiento” (Bolivia), “jam” or “bottleneck” (Spain) and “taco” (Chile).

And in the same way, a Spaniard will not use the verb "talk" but will understand it immediately if he hears it from a Mexican, thanks to the fact that he knows the word "plática".

That same Mexican will talk about the “bolero” that is offered to clean shoes in the street, and Colombians and Bolivians will understand that because they chose “embolador” and “boleador”, respectively.

But everyone will understand what a Spaniard who needs a "shoeshine" means (and they will deduce that it is someone who polishes boots but also shoes).

Now, if we talk about Los Panchos, the word "bolero" will mean the same for everyone.

into our idiomatic variety

.

To the point that this subtitling had to be withdrawn.

What nonsense was that to put "angry" where "angry" was said?

But if we even understood Cantinflas!

An amusing example of autochthonous formations that are nevertheless perfectly understandable to others occurs with the different ways of referring to an abundant but indeterminate amount.

In almost all of these cases, the genius of the Spanish language uses two essential clues to convey this idea of ​​abundance: the elements "hundreds" and "thousand" and the vowel repetitions.

In Spain we will say “tropecientos”, while in Chile, Guatemala, Mexico and El Salvador they will choose “chorrocientos” or “chorromil”.

In Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and Peru, “cuchucientos”.

“Ceremil” will be heard in Cuba;

and “cuchumil”, in Peru and also in the Dominican Republic.

“Hijuemil” and “enemil” are used in Colombia, while Argentines tend to prefer “quichicientos”.

The “seven hundred” option was successful in Chile, Cuba, Mexico and Uruguay;

while in Panama and Venezuela more "sopocentos" is used.

If someone tells us "I told you so a hundred times", we are all perfectly aware of the reproach.

2. Foreign words that are understood even if they are not related.

Perhaps a Spaniard will not express as a first option that his town is "very nice" (he will prefer "very nice") but such an adjective will sound so familiar to him that he will hardly realize that he has heard an unusual word for him.

This group of terms of little active use but of great passive knowledge are easy to understand thanks to the common trunk of the language, the shared history, the literature of both shores, the movies, the soap operas or soap operas, the chacareras , the corridos, the Quino strips, the shows by Les Luthiers, the jokes of the Chapulín Colorado... And thanks to the immense cultural exchanges for centuries between the entire Hispanic world.

In Spain “farra” (party, party) is used because that word came with the tangos.

We can also give as an example the case of "potato" and "potato", two different ways of calling the tuber and of whose respectivity one is perfectly aware on both sides of the Atlantic.

Or that of "banana" and "banana", among many others.

3. Completely unknown words.

In this third group appear words that frequently acquire resonances from pre-Columbian or pre-Roman languages.

Let's take the example of “achichincle”, a word of Nahuatl origin that means “helper” (and sometimes, “the helper's helper”; or “small-time helper”).

And surely many Spanish speakers will be surprised by the Americanism “patota”, used in Argentina, for example, with the meaning of the Spanish “piquete” (union groups that act against those who work during a strike or stoppage);

and with the meaning of "group of friends" or "gang" in other American countries.

In these cases of unknown terms, only two options remain for the interlocutors: either deduce the meaning from the context (something easy, because the context is built in our language) or ask directly: And what is that?

4. Known words... but with another meaning.

Here comes the danger.

We use a word giving it the meaning that has accompanied it all our lives… for us;

but elsewhere they give it a different meaning.

Some of these confusions can be both terrifying and funny.

And they often have to do with meanings lost in one place and preserved in another.

The word "cock", for example, is synonymous in Spain with the male member.

While in much of America it means "bet", "lottery" or "horse racing" (in which you bet).

In this way, "get your cock out" can be interpreted as an obscenity in Spain and as a morrocotuda luck in Peru.

But we Spaniards are to blame for this mess, for having diverted in the mid-twentieth century what for Cervantes in

was a "portion that is placed and bet among those who play" (as the

scholar of 1737).

That same lexicon explained that a participant in a certain card game needs to take five tricks "to draw the dick."

All that little world led to expressions such as “put your dick in” “take your dick out” or “put it in doubled” (double the bet).

The subsequent discovery of a double meaning did the rest.

Misunderstandings not only occur in sexual matters (although they abound there), but in other more everyday matters such as the differences between lunch and dinner;

and, for us journalists, in the different sense that we give here or there to professional terms such as “chronicle” and “reportage”.

Of course, in terms of "taking" we are all warned.

And yet we understand each other.

Studies by different academics on this diversity of the Spanish language show that these words of confusion constitute a tiny percentage.

For example, the Mexican Raúl Ávila undertook an analysis in 1994 of 430,000 words pronounced on Mexican radio and television and concluded that 98.4% of the terms corresponded to general Spanish.

Therefore, the differential vocabulary remained at 1.6%.

Another of his studies indicates that the dubbing of the film

made in Mexico would have served perfectly in Spain if we stick to the vocabulary (not because of the accent, of course).

Therefore, only one subtitling job would have been needed and not two.

Juan Miguel Lope Blanch, a Spanish-Mexican linguist, analyzed in the year 2000 a total of 133,000 words from the Madrid area corresponding to the cultured standard, and found that 99.9% were vocabulary common to Mexico.

The doctoral thesis defended in 2015 at the City University of New York by Luana Ferreira, a New Yorker of Dominican parents, compares three American newspapers in Spanish (Los Angeles, Miami, and New York) with three others in Hispanic America (Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina);

and she comes to the conclusion that the words marked as foreign to Spanish known to all represent less than 1%.

In addition, within that small percentage, the words must be distributed according to the four groups mentioned, and thus there are very few in percentage terms that cannot be easily deduced even if they are suddenly unknown.

All of this leads us to legitimately speak of our unity in diversity;

the unit that allows us to understand each other and at the same time laugh together at the tale of those lexical differences with which we enjoy so much while we take our hand to the glass.

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