That’s a neat collection of graphics. I’m curious how bespoke the creation process is for each graphic or if this is something everyone just does in ArcGis or similar.
That last graphic about the Western US being the only other candidate is interesting because the two sides of the Rockies weren’t connected by a highway until the I70 over Glenwood Canyon was completed in 1992. Before its completion, the western and eastern halves of Colorado were practically different states and it took the interstate highway project half a century to get there because the terrain was so challenging.
Did you already have sea experience, or did you just rent a boat and gave it a try?
As someone who once worked tangentially in search and rescue, please do not even consider this. The ocean is a serious thing, doubly so at night. Unless you are renting a boat large enough to come with its own staff, please do not just head over the horizon simply to see the stars. And fyi, the stars at sea move as the boat you stand on moves. They are brighter, but also more blurry.
Avoiding light pollution is not really about seeing stars through light pollution. Thats for astronomers with telescopes. For human eyes it is more about being dark enough thay your iris can relax and let in more light. Try a dark forest, even a city park, surrounded by trees but able to see up. You will see more stars even if inside an urban area.
Most folks in a city likely have never been able to experience being able to walk by true starlight on a moonless night, and seeing clearly. It would be nearly impossible to get the right conditions even with a lot of effort.
A city park may be okay ish, but you’re unlikely to ever get the level of sight you’d get walking on a deserted playa in the desert. Not enough time with true darkness, and too much other light pollution.
> please do not just head over the horizon simply to see the stars
The horizon is only about 5km away. Not that dangerous.And over the horizon can easily be outside of cell phone range. And is definitely outside of visual range.
So it seems prudent to do a ‘don’t get yourself killed, seriously.’ Warning eh?
Without a shadow of a doubt, the interior of Australia is STAGGERINGLY the best for stargazing. It's not even close.
This was a single 8 second exposure. [1] and I'm not a great photographer. The milky way was so bright it kept me awake in my tent.
I found your description inspiring.
I remember feeling, once, that night time was when everything in the universe could be seen, and daytime was when we slept in the shade of the sun, away from it all.
We had Japanese exchange students in High School, and the teachers stayed in our house (Mum & Dad were teachers). Even though I was only ~15, I have a very strong memory of the 50, 60 and 70 year old Japanese people staying outside until all hours stargazing.
They had never seen stars before.
> They had never seen stars before.
What? Even in a large park in Tokyo, you can see stars. What a silly comment.I've been on a dark ship in the middle of the ocean and that was pretty good for stargazing, though I guess Australia might be a tiny bit better due to less reflective surface (compared to the ocean)?
Works for me (without login). I'm not sure why, it could be uBlock Origin or Privacy Badger maybe.
US 40, 6, and 50 would like a word.
They weren't connected by an interstate before that. But you said "highway". US 6 was a highway, and it ran through the exact same Glenwood Canyon.
I mean, I remember around 1968-69, before they finished building Interstate 80 up Echo Canyon, and that tiny two-lane road had to take all the commercial traffic that there was on "the main street of North America".
No it hasn't. "Highway" encompasses a lot of levels of road. If you're referring to an interstate, say so. That's the only thing that actually means that, and only that.
Check out Cherry Springs State Park in Pennsylvania: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_Springs_State_Park
Those are all longer exposure, at different wavelengths, stitched together digitally.
With your bare eye in the focal point of that thing you'd just see Jupiter and some of its moons, the Rings of Saturn, some extrasolar nebulae and some galaxies better than with common amateur telesecopes. Otherwise just more and brighter stars, with some more hints of color.
You'd have more immersion by using binoculars with a wide field of view, and low magnification, like 10 to 20, maybe 30 times. But the latter with a wide field of view are rather heavy, so bring a foldable camping chair to lie down on, and some contraption to have the binoc hanging down on you, easily movable, but not shaky. Or a tripod, but they are impractical for looking straight up. (with common binocular eye-pieces)
You can still go physically, there's tours and such. But it doesn't make sense for a physicist to go there when all the imagery is captured by a computer anyway.
Also, if you've been to those altitudes you know it's not a walk in the park either!
It is because its path is closer to the Sun. So when looking towards it you are always partly looking towards the Sun.
It actually just recently (start of June) went behind the sun; it’s still too close to the sun in the sky to really be visible at all at the moment. As it moves further out from behind the sun it will start being visible in the evening sky in late July right after the sun sets, so it will be the ‘evening star’ again for the next eight months or so before it passes in front of the sun, disappearing from view for a bit, then comes back as the morning star next summer.
The stars seemed to shine 10x brighter than other places, even those without light pollution.
And we did see a fireball meteor, so that kinda made up for it. But I don’t think those are guaranteed.
For the North American peeps, check out the western part of the US.
*edit: and forecasts https://www.cleardarksky.com/csk/
This one is more mobile-friendly, IMO.
They’re fun to make combining design, data, graphics programming, and lots of fiddling to get the tools to do what you want!
We have zero snakes and very few dangerous spiders and you'd have to try very hard to find them, they're rather shy.
Also, we make great coffee and beer.
It reminds me of the style of pop science books written in the late 19th and early 20th century. There's a nice charm in it, like it's trying not to be pretentiously complex.
https://fortune.com/2020/08/10/the-overnight-coronavirus-exp...
She can't write or communicate at any level beyond typical hairdresser. Considering it's very hard to fail out of most upper level education unless you simply don't do the work at all, we really should stop giving people so much credit for just getting degrees.
It's what you do with it that matters and how you devote yourself on your own time that makes people great. And that's what the previous commenter was doing. Trying to give credit to some education system someone went through is taking away from the person that actually made something of themselves, almost always by themselves.
Side note, I graduated with a MechE degree from UC Berkeley. Decent grades. I can honestly say I learned almost nothing. I just did a ton of work they wanted. If I made something of myself in the engineering field, I promise it wasn't because of UC Berkeley.
No dark patterns to make you spend a longer time on the webpage for ad metrics.
4th grade English
I can't stand it to be honest and stopped reading because of this.
Peru & Bolivia went to war with Chile for that region, but they lost in the War of the Pacific.
Why fight? Natural resources: guano and saltpeter.
Back then, guano was the world’s main fertilizer (and this area had most of the world's guano, thanks to the climate).
"""
That fertilizer produced iconic advertising in mid XX Century Portugal and Spain: https://c8.alamy.com/comp/AR22G9/nitrato-de-chile-advertisin...
Not really. Just like English, the standard variety in each country is considered equally "standard".
> I understand it to be based on Castilian.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. As far as I know Castilian is just a synonym for the Spanish language (as opposed to other languages of Spain e.g. Catalan). So the variety spoken in Guatemala and the one in Tenerife are equally "Castilian".
But, people always deviate from it, though in my experience in word meanings and pronunciation, never in grammar to a degree that it become intelligible to another Spanish speaker.
The toughest film to listen to for me was "The rose seller"[1] (1998), took me like 10m to get my ear accustomed to their pronunciation.
It being so artificial means that it doesn't fit anywhere, even it if's becoming more common (Kids are growing up listening to Media dubbed to it, so it's not weird seing a Child "speak like a cartoon" for a while until their local dialect kicks in)
As the Spanish empire extended its spread so widely the language grew pretty complex (as english did!) so not even the most "neutral" spanish speaking countries do it as the RAE intends.
On the other hand, Chileans really do speak their very own language.
Only informally. Formal Chilean Spanish is probably one of the most understandable ones, accent-wise. (There's still some vocabulary differences)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfvrmrYG_-c
But I think chileans are ok with people saying we don't speak well, so it doesn't matter too much.
Where the announcer is actually overpronouncing while still keeping (expectedly) some elision. In your example, Boric’s formal register is closer to what one would usually listen.
> chileans are ok with people saying we don't speak well
I never claimed that, I am merely addressing your “one of the most understandable” statement.
I met my ex-wife in Madrid where I lived for 4 years and where she was from. That's where I learned Spanish as a second language. After we moved back to California, we obviously met and spoke to many Mexicans over the years. Zero problems communicating for her, ever. Spanish is still Spanish.
Also, the Spanish Royal Academy for the language logs every word from Iberia to Mexico and the Patagonia at their online dictionary, so everyone can guess the meaning of a local word in the spot.
I think it might actually mean unintelligible. If you read on the term "dialect" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect it says in part:
> There is no universally accepted criterion for distinguishing two different languages from two dialects (i.e. varieties) of the same language.
The difference between language is more culturally and politically defined than linguistically; there are different langauges spoken in the world that have a fiar overlap and elligibility, and there are different dialects of the same "language" that are basically untelligable. It might be sensible to just consider all spoken systems to be "dialects" of each other, and comparing their similarity.
Not a linguist though.
As for how the table of Spanish dialects was constructed, the figure gives the link to the paper it was from [1]. Basically they measured differences in dialects by giving pictures of an item (the example shown is a pinwheel) and asking what Spanish speakers from different places called that thing. Given hundreds of different concepts you can see how close Spanish dialects are to each other.
[1] https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/opli-2018-003...
It would be a much different story if British English and American English had different words for "a car". Which, by the way, happens in Spanish dialects ("el coche" vs "el carro").
but if you showed an argentine a picture of a car, they might very well say 'auto' while perhaps someone from elsewhere would say 'coche', leading to a basically incorrect point of difference being measured in this study between the two dialects
You can design a study with a high level of data granularity. You could even track differences in pronunciation and grammar if you wish so.
A well-designed study, in my mind, would compare the usage of a varied bag of words. Starting from articles, pronouns, numbers, common verbs, then common objects, verb forms, less common adjectives, ending with uncommon objects and phrases. The compared words would be weighted based on their frequency. If two dialects have the same articles, pronouns, numbers, etc. and some differences in less frequent nouns, they would be similar rather than radically different - at least lexically. Things might look differently if we look at pronunciation.
I don't know what list of words was compared in the study linked in this subthread, so it's hard for me to say anything about it.
* auto: car
* coche: stroller or carriage (depending on context)
* carro: cart or carriage (see above)
Automóvil: Formal word for car.
Coche: Car. If used with 'de caballos' (of horses), well, carriage.
Carro: Carriage, or trolley.
Similarly, Germany has plenty of mutually unintelligible dialects. They are all related to each other and any two geographically adjacent dialects are mutually intelligible, but as distance grows it becomes harder to bridge the gap (which is why everyone learns Standard German nowadays). Luxembourgish meanwhile is in every sense a dialect of German with French influences, but due to having an army is considered its own language.
I speak Chilean Spanish. Distinctive characteristics include no use of vos; the "tú" conjugation is often "-ai" (cómo estai?) or "-i" (qué teni allí?); saying weón every sentence; using "po" for emphasis (sí po!); specific words like "fome" (boring), "la raja" (awesome), "bacán" (cool); phrases like "estoy cagado de hambre", "estoy chato", "pasarlo chancho", "cachai?"...
It's also very related to class, at least in Chile. Even I struggle to understand people in tougher neighborhoods of Santiago.
A: Yes
> The dispute began in 1879, when Chile invaded the Antofagasta port city on its northern border with Bolivia as part of a dispute over taxes. Within four years Chileans had redrawn the map of South America by taking almost 50,000 square miles of Bolivian territory, including its 250-mile coastline on the southern Pacific Ocean. Bolivia accepted this loss in 1904, when it signed a peace treaty with Chile in return for a promise of the “fullest and freest” commercial access to port.
The dispute is seen differently in Chile and is not as simplistic as Chile invading a port. In general i've gotten the sense that the general populace believes that Bolivia(with its secret alliance with Peru) had other intentions.
>In February 1878, Bolivia increased taxes on the Chilean mining company Compañía de Salitres y Ferrocarril de Antofagasta [es] (CSFA), in violation of the Boundary Treaty of 1874 which established the border between both countries and prohibited tax increases for mining. Chile protested the violation of the treaty and requested international arbitration, but the Bolivian government, presided by Hilarión Daza, considered this an internal issue subject to the jurisdiction of the Bolivian courts. Chile insisted that the breach of the treaty would mean that the territorial borders denoted in it were no longer settled.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Pacific
>Ill-defined borders and oppressive measures allegedly taken against the Chilean migrant population in these territories furnished Chile with a pretext for invasion.
https://www.britannica.com/place/Chile/The-War-of-the-Pacifi...
The result? Bolivia lost all of its coastline, and Peru also lost its southern territories.
You can summarize the war as in Bolivia and Peru fcked around, and then found out.
Chiloe and Puerto Montt were damp, cold, and fog-shrouded in Summer (Jan-Feb), very similar to parts of the coastal pacific northwest.
The area to its north, centered around the German-influenced town of Valdivia, was California-like. Very temperate in Summer, and very green. Lots of pastures and rivers.
The region becomes progressively more "Mediterranean" as you move further north; one gradually sees fewer pastures and woodlands, more vineyards, olive trees, and fruit orchards. Santiago is on the far northern end of this Mediterranean zone. The great wine regions are generally to the south and west of that capital city.
A few hours north of Santiago and all is desert -- but it's a fairly live desert, with all sorts of succulent plants and many types of flower. Most of the road traffic in these parts comes from copper miners and their work trucks.
Continue north and you're in a dry, mostly empty, moonscape. Antofagasta and Calama are nice enough towns, though, and the interesting drive from the former to the latter takes just two hours but sees you rise from sea level to +2000m. It's such a gentle and relentless slope that you barely notice it. Nothing at all like driving in the Alps.
I broke something in my rental car when I continued to the geysers at +4000m, but it was worth it.
Going straight to the Torres themselves will usually be crowded (depending on the time of the day). But some of the other hikes less so. I've done the W Circuit (a multi-day trek) and during some days I barely saw another hiker.
I visited Torres de Paine and it was refreshingly different from national parks in the US. On the upside, you can get water and basic snacks at the refugios which reduce the load you have to carry, and makes for an overall safer experience than unsupported wilderness backpacking but still with minimal impact on nature. On the other hand I did not like that they close a lot of viewpoints long before sunset.
Yes, but some tourists change the nature by leaving their garbage etc.
"Nevertheless, recent paleoenvironmental studies performed within the Park indicate that fires have been frequent phenomena at least during the last 12,800 years."
So fires are a normal thing there, or they have tourists since 12,800 years ..
Yes. Just mountain climbing in northern Patagonia (between Bariloche & Villarica, really only 100mi of north-south distance) became my favorite part of the world for your reason. In a single day (or two), we could walk in the dry, dusty bottom of a canyon dug out by glacier melt, cross through a humid jungle, rest on the shores of an alpine lake, pick your way across a massive rocky field of a'a lava, up a glacier and look down inside the caldera of an active volcano.
The only other place I have been that come close to having that amount of diversity of terrain in a limited area might be the Tetons/Yellowstone.
The thing that boggled my mind was that you can't drive between the two without a very long detour through Argentina. Chile has literally no road linking the northern part with the southernmost part without going outside the country.
It is also mind boggling that rail is not more popular there. A long, slim country is ideal for high speed rail.
That would require the upper class to mix with the poor. Not acceptable in Chile.
I don't know anything about the history of trains or carriages, but in the heyday of railway development in Britain (iron rails, steam locomotive, etc.) it would have been far less acceptable than today too. And still all trains I'm aware of/have been on have two classes of carriage. Indian trains have several, and similar cultural need for that I imagine (I don't really know anything about Chile).
See one of my other comments in this post regarding the rail in Chile.
Classic Argentinian bureaucracy, making the country lose money since time immemorial
Another place like this, perhaps lesser in scale, is the Big Island of Hawaii. Its latitude means the trade winds are blowing from the same direction year-round, bringing moisture to the windward side (e.g. Hilo, HI with 120" average annual rainfall) and leaving the leeward side dry (e.g. Kailua-Kona, HI with under 20" average annual rainfall), on the other side of massive volcanoes. And you can go from the ocean to almost 14k feet in elevation in an hour's drive; this may be one of the only places in the world where you can do that.
All of this means that as you move around Big Island, based on the precipitation, humidity, and elevation, you're going to see wildly different environments mere minutes' drive from each other. It truly has to be seen to be believed.
I've been twice and both times the Big Island was my favorite. Maui and Kauai are spectacular in their own ways, as are the few rural areas of Oahu, but there's nothing like the Big Island. The drive from Kailua-Kona to Hilo over the Saddle Road (which, in itself, goes to around 6600 ft) is spectacular, and if you have enough time to make a day of it, coming back around via the southern ring road is well worth it. If you get up early, Waimea and the surrounding area (esp the NW protuberance of land) are worth seeing as well. Huge variation in biomes in very short distances.
Just by the sea, beaches and small banana plantations. Go slightly inland and up the hills, you're in an arid region. Continue slightly further up, and you get into a lush, verdant forest. All within maybe 20 minutes' drive.
Best part? There's no airport on the island - you have to fly to Tenerife and take a ferry.
To this day, the best tomatoes I've ever had.
I love Chiloe and Los Lagos region. I would buy a “southern summer” house there if I didn’t have kids in school.
There was a very similar model in California as well. Seasonal migration from the sea to the hills and back. Given the supposed patterns of settlement of the Americas maybe this is not particularly surprising.
If I had to come up with an excuse for not having trains, I'd chose that.
Anything else is military coup laundering.
I was briefly disoriented when I stayed on the North coast of Cyprus where the situation is the opposite.
Looking at those maps, I understand their incredulity. Because of the shape of Chile, you can drive a similar distance and basically cover the entire country, rural, urban, and suburban. It's both a large country and a small one at the same time.
1 million is fairly large, especially in the context of Chile.
DC’s “Metropolitan area in 2020 was 6,385,162” it’s CSA was 9,546,579 in 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_metropolitan_area
That list puts it at 5.2 million people.
That CSA also includes Baltimore so not a vary fair example. Absolutely not the same metro.
The CSA isn’t necessarily relevant, but a reasonable agreement exists that it’s really the same metro area. The beltways (495, 695) are less than 25 miles apart. Laurel, Maryland is 20 miles from both downtown DC and downtown Baltimore. Meanwhile the other cities from Richmond to Boston are 95-200 miles from each other.
I knew someone whose tech support job would regularly send them to both cities in the same day. Apparently many companies located between them so they could easily serve both.
Just like there are people who commute from New York to London, or vice-versa. NyLon is a thing, but that still doesn’t make them two parts of the same city.
People commuting from downtown Baltimore to DC have a faster commute than many living in well recognized DC suburbs. That’s very different than NyLon.
I don't really know what's far enough, but culturally they consider themselves entirely distinct. People from one almost never work in the other; the trains that do exist are for bringing people from the suburbs.
Even those suburbs are fairly distinct. There's a dividing line at Columbia, MD where people go both directions, and nearly everybody else affiliates themselves with one city or the other.
Another way to look at it: they have separate sports teams. They're not even rivals, because they play in different leagues. Within the city fans are pretty exclusive, and the other city's teams aren't of interest.
Maybe that would change if it were possible to live in one and work in the other, or if they commonly shared night-life or restaurants or leisure. Instead, the other city is a full-day trip, not a jaunt across town.
Baltimore and DC are absolutely one metro, just like Dallas/Fort Worth and Minneapolis/Saint Paul. That two cities have distinct identities doesn’t mean they aren’t one metro.
Like, imagine SF and Oakland, but with an extra 30 miles in between.
Culture, recreational activities, demographics, etc. vary quite a bit in other "twin city" type situations as well. Dallas and Fort Worth are about as culturally different as you can get at that distance, and of course people don't live downtown in one and work in the other - people are making a very specific choice with very specific tradeoffs when it comes to living in a downtown area in general, and those don't make sense if you're not explicitly spending most of your time in that area. Income is about the only thing that doesn't hold true in the Texas and Minnesota examples listed elsewhere in the comments, and DC has some conditions fairly specific to it that cause that.
I don't have a link but I remember reading an article/Blog post linked here on hn where a software developer was in San Francisco one evening, saw the cops arresting someone, went to say something, got arrested himself and they held him over a long weekend or something in terrible conditions, and the police officers said some terrible things like the person he arrested was overpaid and the officer had to live in Oakland or something.
I've never been to SF/Oakland but this is one of the first thing I think of when the place is mentioned. How is the employee to blame for structural/ societal issues. What kind of idiot dumps their frustration on just some passer by?
From late 1989 to mid 1998, I lived in various parts of Northern Virginia and the Capitol region of Maryland, and made many trips to Baltimore. Totally not the same metro.
Look at the UN 2019 population estimates and sort by it. The last 10 areas are
5.49m, 5.49m, 5.38m, 5.38, 5.30m, 5.21m, 5.16m, 5.09m, 5.05m, 5.02m
Given how curves like this usually go there's an extremely long tail to get to 1m
Concepcion has only ~200k people with <1m metro. Looking at a map of the city and with only 200k people it doesn't seem big
I hadn't actually googled concepcion, 200,000 in the urban area is quite small. It would be interesting to somehow workout the percentile of population living in a larger/smaller place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_with_over_one_m...
Under 1M and the city center tends to be very small with most people driving from the suburbs.
The post above said "The Concepción metro area is 1 million people" which means the city itself is much smaller. In fact, Wikipedia says it's 200k people, 1m metro area
Just having grown up in LA (the city), I think there's a cognitive bias in these places against recognizing just how freakin large they are when you live there. There are large corners of my home metro area I've never been to at all, whose people I would almost never interact with... and I say that as a former taxi driver! Of course, taxi driving in LA was always balkanized so you'd need separate licenses to pick up in this or that suburb... very Snow Crash-like even in the 90s.
That's a very US or modern Asian city view. In my corner of the world, the Rhine-Ruhr area and the Franco/German/Benelux region almost all cities are < 1 million but you'd be hard pressed to not call Ghent or Rotterdam[1] or Düsseldorf a proper city.
[1]https://t0.gstatic.com/licensed-image?q=tbn:ANd9GcR5dl_qfSco...
European cities - compared to U.S at least - also maybe have the factor of how long it has been a city to contribute to how much "a city" it seems.
“This is a city of shifting light, of changing skies, of sudden vistas. A city so beautiful it breaks the heart again and again.”
https://www.citypopulation.de/en/uk/agglo/S20000463A__edinbu...
The festivals also completely skew things. Edinburgh in February is a vastly different city than Edinburgh in August.
1 million is barely a city, around 5 million and you are a 2nd tier city, hit 8+ million and you are a "real city".
Meanwhile people in America are arguing that they are worried their "100k town is going to add 5000 people and become an urban hellscape!"
It's small. It's 200k people. It's "metro area" (the 1m) is spread out.
I think this is where you gave it away. Nobody will believe this and we're all moving to south Chile now.
You can learn more here https://elsemieni.net/megavision/
[Cerveza Cristal theme]
My first ever look at the states was out the window of a plane flying to NYC from the Bahamas at night. Straight up the east coast. Mind blowing. To my eyes it was one enormous city without any meaningful separation all the way. I was expecting to be surprised by the scale of the usa and yet it was way beyond what i could imagine.
Others won’t share that definition.
It's sprawled more since.
Apparently the term was coined by Herman Kahn in 1967: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BosWash>
Oddly enough, albeit anecdotal, this is true everywhere; in every country and every continent, people are looser in the south. That said, if it's also true for Chile then it means it's not related to the climate.
What does “loose” mean in this context? My first impression would be that the accent in northern Chile is “looser” than the south.
Fun to think about, but I'm sure there are as many counterexamples as there are examples. In the Germanic languages, for example, no one could deny that Swedish or Norwegian are much more sing-songy than stodgy German.
If you imagine the full graph of all countries horizontally and vertically, there would be a lot of overlap (the PR column and DR row, and the DR column and PR row). So to save that redundancy, for all countries except Spain (very top) and Argentina (far right) you have to look around a bit to see where it crosses any other given country.
Indigenous language effecting Spanish is something that would effect everyone in South America, so even if you remove Spain from the table, Colombia, Chile, the Caribbean and Costa Rica will all stand out about how "different" they are from the rest of South America, probably from their physical barriers separating them from the rest of the continent.
As a Chilean living in the US, seeing this on HN made my day - it’s not often the rest of the world (outside of South America) remembers we exist.
I miss the Inca though. Talking about Chile without mentioning the Inca Empire is like talking about Italy without mentioning the Roman Empire.
> It’s the farthest region from Spain, so the least communicated to the rest of the empire, and hence the one that drifted the most from the homeland.
Er... if you look at the table (https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1272,c_limit,f_webp,q_...), Chile has quite a lot of red, but actually its Spanish is closer to the Spanish from Spain than that of other South American countries. So it looks like those have drifted further from "standard" Spanish, while Chile hasn't as much?
Also, Spain Spanish is not necessarily "Standard" (Castilian) Spanish.
To desert, v, stress on the second syllable, means to leave/abandon something.
Desert, n, stress on the second syllable, is what you deserve "he got his just deserts"
Dessert, n, stress on the second syllable, is a sweet course of a meal that follows the main course. It has an extra s because of its etymology not its pronunciation.
I'm quite sure this mess was designed to be as confusing as possible.
I’ll just say: kuchen, cachái.
Which other modern language uses cachái, with the same spelling, in the same context as Chile?
> I can't recall any other German loanwords aside from kuchen.
Still influenced the dialect, didn’t it?
> Still influenced the dialect, didn’t it?
A few food names do not qualify as "influenced the dialect" for me. Mapudungun did influence the Chilean dialect, but German did not. I generally find the "German influence in the south" very exaggarated and a cover-up for the fact that the primary influences in the south have always come from Mapuche culture.
But there's a broad veneration of Germans and other Europeans, combined with a disdain towards indigenous peoples and their cultures, so the "German South" myth withstands, along with that one photo of Puerto Varas taken from the right angle to make it look like a German town.
This is correct. Case in point: Beamer.
> A few food names do not qualify as "influenced the dialect" for me.
For you. That doesn’t change the fact that the term has widespread use all over the national territory.
> Mapudungun did influence the Chilean dialect
If you want to stress the point, I’d additionally argue that a larger amount of indigenous-derived terms (including several words for vegetables) came from the Quechua. Although, according to your own set of criteria, a few food names would not qualify.
Your conclusion is then that Chilean Spanish has no Quechua language influence in any serious way?
> the only linguistic legacy of Germans in Chile are kuchen, strudel, and some weird last names used as street names
You forgot bocha, polca, and murra.
> murra
It's mora down here.
If you want to understand Spanish this is the best resource available
Not all people in this academy descend from the Borbons. Not all people there are from Spain. All are voted by their peers based in their perceived merits. Is a meritocracy, not a monarchy.
Some people appreciate the fact that there are experts on Spanish language trying to help everybody. Other will keep saying the equivalent to "Experts thing that are better than me" or "Death to conquerors. Mine is better, Murica!!". Everybody has their own choice, but the reward is ending with a language that nobody will understand. A very silly prize.
Any centralized institution that is in charge of overseeing a large and diverse number of countries that have evolved spanish over the past ~400 years is, in my eyes, set to fail.
Now, I do use RAE all the time to check definitions, but I see it as a "descriptive" body, in charge of creating some definitions. But even some of those definitions have to be "scrutinized" and can't be literally and blindly trusted. For example, check the definition of "gitano", which has a clear pejorative connotation. That is not wrong, is just the reality of how the "spanish speaking world" expresses itself. But should you take that definition by heart? I don't think so.
This is a clear example of "The Cathedral vs the Bazaar", as in Open Source vs privative software. I'm a hacker, I prefer a bazaar to a single institution dictating how we should talk..
About your "neologisms", no they are calcos or loan translations [3], they are not neologisms. They would be neologisms if they were new words, not copy of words from other languages.
I tone down my (English language) accent when speaking to foreigners all the time. The point is to be understood.
I'm toning it down right now in this message. I want to be clear to a wider audience, not folksy.
So is Spain really telling other people the way they speak is "wrong", or is there simply a prestige accent, best utilised for international communication so the maximum amount of people can understand?
And by the way, counterintuitively, languages have NOT evolved to be better understood, but on the contrary, to "separate" or create cohesion in smaller groups.
Guess which word took precedence?
[1] https://www.asale.org/academias/academia-argentina-de-letras
Andalusians will change naturally to a more standard and fully intelligible Spanish when talking with somebody from Zaragoza (or even with Andalusian people that use a different accent). And any educated person can write fully understandable standard Spanish.
I think the chart is saying less about differences relative to Spanish Spanish and more about each regional dialect relative to the others.
In the table, the countries appear to be ordered (horizontally as well as vertically) by distance relative to Spain. Assuming there's nothing (like an ocean) to prevent the diffusion and evolution of language, given any cross-location in the grid, the cells nearest should theoretically have little to no gradient.
That's clearly not the case with Chile and isolation due to the Andes seems like a reasonable cause.
Colombia and Costa Rica also exhibit this effect, though, and I'm not sure why. FARC? They are separated by Panama and the PCZ; has the canal had an effect of preserving Panama's cultural ties relative to other countries at the expense of those of CO/CR?
Edit: s/Columbia/Colombia/; s/expensive/expense/
I’m pretty sure that’s the case for every country in the world.
Aside from that, judge for yourself: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colombian_Spanish
It's hard to understand some Chilean speakers but that's because they don't modulate their voice and cut or join words. But grammatically they are "correct".
There is a lot of Chilean slang and it's almost universally understood from north to south. But people are aware of it, it's usually not used at work. And then there are a lot of words which are just different, just about every fruit has a different name.
Easter Island makes sense, you don't necessarily expect islands that are far away to share the mainlands timezone. Antarctica is one that probably catches a lot of people since most time zone maps don't even bother to include it and there is no real population there.
It has to do with differences in latitude. In winter, the southernmost region of Chile[1] was completely dark at around 4 PM with the old time zone. Staying on summer time for the whole year gives its inhabitants an additional hour of sunlight.
[1]: Which includes, but is not equivalent to, Antarctica: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magallanes_Region
Now that's not really true is it :) It's robbing Peter to pay Paul.
One quibble. At the end it mentions why Mexico's west was of interest to the Spanish, but neglects possibly the most important part - it was where the Spanish galleons from the Philippines first landed after the grueling trip across the Pacific as detailed beautifully in Neal Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle".
Samurai were documented as guards on galleons brought to Mexico. It needs to be a movie.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tai-Pan_(novel)
Shogun is about Japan in the Samurai period and Taipan is about Hong Kong a few centuries ago.
Both novels are about those periods and about Westerners interacting with those countries at that time.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Clavell
[
Clavell wanted to write a second novel because "that separates the men from the boys".[21] The money from King Rat enabled him to spend two years researching and then writing what became Tai-Pan (1966). It was a huge best-seller, and Clavell sold the film rights for a sizeable amount (although the film would not be made until 1986).[22]
]
> Chile is so long because of the Andes. Here's a map of elevation in South America.
> You can't easily pass these mountains, and the tiny sliver of land to their west is Chile.
And going north<->south is so easy, that anyone doing it could likely cover the whole country pretty quick. So odds are, if there were two countries in that area, there would be just one pretty quickly.
Definitely one of those ‘geography defines the culture and the borders’ situations.
Gradual elevation is certainly easier to build roads across than a cliff, and might be another reason there's less east-west divide in North America.
Chile has an Antarctic claim going all the way to the pole. If you consider that, it's impossible to go further south
If you don't, then we still just run out of land in the Continent. Note that the neighbour competition also applies to Tierra del Fuego, as we've had tensions with Argentina through history over the control of Magallanes Channel.
Source: I lived there
Better source: https://www.marcachile.cl/en/interesting-facts-about-chile-a...
The Antarctic claim is taken seriously, though. It comes from The Treaty of Tordesillas
See also “chilean empire map” (it’s not serious).
For example, my wife learned English later in life and can understand neutral/midwestern American fine, but has tons of trouble with southern and northeastern regional accents.
"el weon weon, weon."
Is a polysemic word, but when used as adjective means "somebody with big balls"; by extension "somebody that spends the day sitting on their own testicles, unable to carry them"
So a huevón is "a lazy lad", "a douchebad" or simply "a dude" (colloquially and vulgar, but also playful if applied to a close friend).
The word is a minefield, some people will feel amused, other insulted, and is a faux pas with women. Better avoid it unless you know what you are doing.
It can be an angry insult, a demeaning adjective, a term of endearment, an expression of surprise or bewilderment, ...
When Chileans drop 'weon' ten times in two minutes in their conversations what they are saying is "I'm not Argentinian".
This is the real message.
Because Argentinians would use their trade mark "boludo" instead. Boludo is exactly the same that Weon. A boludo is somebody with "big balls". A weon is somebody with "big eggs". Both words have small differences in their meanings but are mutually exclusive (You either use one or the other). They are tribal tags.
If you want to do business with a Chilean, knowing were to casually drop 'weon' in an --strictly-- informal context is pure gold. It grants instant ghetto pass. Mexicans or Argentinians have their own equivalent words. If you use the wrong password the doors will close, so is risky and you need to dominate the context and use it sparingly. The overuse could be socially awkward and outdated (Imagine somebody from Sevilla going to Texas dressed on a fake cowboy disguise, pretending to walk like one and talking to you about business while spitting tobacco and flashing a weapon. Is 120% stoopid).
Spanish world is complex. Latinos can belong to several worlds at the same time. Lets take for example the singer Gloria Stephan. Gloria Stephan is a 100% USA citizen. But it was born in Cuba so felts Cuban traditions also as part of her culture. And her Grandparents are from the North of Spain, so Gloria Stephan identity is an USA-Cuban-Spanish-almost-Irish music star.
Most Latinos learn soon to adjust their different identities to the context appropriate, and wear or drop their accents and languages accordingly.
On the other hand, when somebody choose to say 'mergear' instead 'mezclar', the message for millions of people is: "look ma, I'm talking English. Almost". As the band Blur would say: "He'd like to live in magic America with all those magic people". Youngsters crave for acceptation and local friendship, so Spanglish or local accents are seen as something very valuable for making relationships
But grown people needs to adjust the message later. If you are a Chilean that migrate to Spain and keep saying "weon" all the time, what you are remembering to everybody is "I don't belong there".
And is the same problem with Spanglish. If you want to use English, by Pete's sake, talk in the most correct English that you can afford. Get the respect that you deserve, instead to introduce yourself like a wannabee latino redneck. If you need Spanish in business, the safe baby-proof choice is to learn neuter Spanish. Period. Will provide the most bang for the buck. But don't be ashamed to wear the multiple rich cloaks of Spanish in your benefit in the correct contexts.
Looks like they're rating "difficulty" as "difference from Spanish in Spain". Considering that Spaniards only represent about 10% of the total Spanish-speaking population, I'm not sure that's fair.
Argentine Spanish is the strange one, due to the heavy Italian influence.
These memes are popular in Latin America, it's definitely not just a Spain thing.
https://craigcalcaterra.com/blog/long-chile-ohio2-and-the-sn...
I never quite figured out what it meant.
From my experience, (Portuguese native speaker who learned Spanish) Colombian Spanish is much easier than Mexican. And the worst Spanish, by far, is from the Dominican Republic. Chile is not that bad, it is quite close to Argentinian, actually.
I have to say though that Chilean spanish is commonly considered quite hard to understand, they speak really fast with lots of mannerisms and "can't understand a single thing of a Chilean speaking" is a common meme in Argentina at the very least.
And even that data is kind of suspect, based on a simple glimpse at the screenshot, which shows idioms for "ISN'T IT?". Colombians definitely would say all of the following, unlike shown in the table:
A cada quien le va según quiere Dios, ____
- cierto?
- no?
- o no?
- si o no?
And actually would probably not say "si?" as shown. "Verdad?" might be heard, but maybe an older generation.Also, I had no idea Chile is sooo long.
Technically New Zealand is the exposed portion of a continental sliver.
As a native Spanish speaker, I find this quite interesting. For me, Chileans are within the category of "easy to understand" while I might struggle a bit understanding some accents that the article qualifies as easy or normal.