Gender of the internet???
its a Spoon Steve, just a fucking spoon. Not a masculine spoon, or a feminine spoon, just a fucking spoon. /Izzard
Spanish is an accommodating lingo, as the recent influx of tech and net-related Anglicisms attests, but these foreign invaders often prove challenging for Castillian orthography. The general line of attack is to adapt spelling in accordance with local custom where necessary, so while "chat", as in chatear (to chat), requires …
I've only ever heard it pronounced wasap and not being mobile phone obsessed thought it was to do with a beer advert of a few years ago.
It seems most beer related words are feminine, my favourite being jarra and at the moment one that has preferably been pre-iced in a freezer.
It's usually pronounced "wasap" (except in Murcia apparently - "wasa") but it was the spelling I was interested in.
Evidently the fact that this article failed to inspire you is down to a lack of jarras, either here or in your corner of Iberia. This must be rectified immediately.
Being a spaniard I can tell you I had a big laugh reading your article :)
The fact that in spanish everything must have a gender so the syntax can be properly constructed creates some very funny situations. There are some words like "arma" (weapon) that has one gender in singular and another in plural ("el arma" is male, "las armas" is female), or can have both genders like with "mar" (sea) that can be male or female depending more on preference or intention of the speaker ("el mar" is male and used most of the time, "la mar" is female and used by people like sailors and poets that intent to express some kind of affection towards the sea).
About words like Internet, depending on the country you will hear different genders (in Cuba seems to be female, and in Colombia seems to be male). In Spain most of the time articles are avoided when talking about Internet, as here Internet is more like a personal name (like a person's first name) and it is written without any article and with a capital letter at the beginning.
Anyway, for tech stuff, english is king ;)
P.D: Paella, sangria, olé :)))))
> There are some words like "arma" (weapon) that has one gender
> in singular and another in plural ("el arma" is male, "las armas" is
> female),
Or agua. But no, it's always feminine; it is always "el agua fria", not "el agua frio". It is just el/la that changes, to avoid the awkward a-a. The equivalent in french is changing le or la to l' when the noun starts with a vowel.
"El arma" is not male at all. Ex: El arma estaba cargada (the weapon was loaded). The use of the male article depends on the word "arma" being llana (grave). I'm sorry to be pedantic but spaniards really ought to learn their beautiful language better. An Italian living in Spain.
In Puerto Rico, we say "la Internet." This comes by metonymic gender assignment, from "la inter-red," "net" being an anglisism of the proper Spanish word "red" (net).
Surprising that La Real Academia chose differently. Now for the important stuff, ¿dónde está la cerveza?
dZ.
In general, any word of uncertain gender (ie, a foreign import) will become masculine, unless there's good reason for it not to. Your Puerto Rican methodology is sound, although La Real Academia appears to have defaulted to the safe option.
Hoy, ya que hace sol, la cerveza está en el frigorífico, pero muy pronto pasará al estómago.
> she say El Internet.
Como si lo hubieran inventado ellos. :-/
That said, the final consonant and the initial non-stressed vowel make it likely that, regardless of gender, the masculine article will be used.
And if you think Spanish makes things complicated, try guessing the gender of a foreign word in a four-gender language with gender-dependent declension.
Isn’t it a proper noun? Why would it need translating? I know of course there are translations of names, (Londres is London for example) but this is an invented trademark.
Genuine question, as I’m surprised there would be official advice on alternative spellings as companies normally protect their trademarks to the hilt.
Is it just because of the difficulty of pronouncing it? Wouldn't they trademark an official re-name for Spanish speaking countries?
Most Spanish letters are pronounced as per their alphabet, and usually only have that one sound.
W is pronounced (roughly) 'ubay doblay'
I can't do it very well, but love getting my son to say www quickly...
A 'Wh' doesn't really occur, (AFAIAAW) so for a Spaniard to pronounce it as written using their method it would be similar to 'whiskey' as above using 'gui'
Where I live, as with many things they have inherited from the internet, they adopt the english pronunciation.
Gender is a pain in the butt for us English speakers who are unaccustomed to it. I'm always getting my 'la' and 'el' mixed up. I also badly miss 'it' which they don't really have.
Ah well. The suns shining and the beer is cold. What do I care :-) Salut !
In my limited experience (mainly amongst friends in their 30s/40s) it's whatsapp and the derived verb whatsappear (hence the subject above, real example). In Guatemala recently there were tshirts all over the place saying "Guatzap?" but I think that was just a word play for the tshirt rather then being a generally used term. Shame really.
Indeed. And World Wide Web != internet.
Most days I use a mail transfer agent to send and receive emails over the internet, without using a browser! Sometimes I move files around with and FTP program. I have been known to make internet phone calls. still without touching the web at all!
-A.
> I'm disappointed, Lester.
Whether you're disappointed or not, he's right.
> Web != (Inter)net.
That's correct semantically, but not semiotically speaking, which is the context in which Haines was writing.
In other words, for a Spanish speaker from Spain (not necessarily from Latin America), "la red" means "the web", not "the internet".
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> If I understand correctly, in Spanish everything has a gender, but Spaniards avoid phrase constructions which would make them use a gender explicitly.
No, not in the usual case. Only in very few specific cases when dealing with foreign words. In the case of "Internet", it is considered a proper noun and those in Spanish are not usually preceded by an article (indeed it is considered "incorrect" in the sense that it's non-prescriptive, albeit from an usage point of view it is an accepted regionalism and sometimes in familiar speech). So strictly, there is nothing too unusual in this sense.
Foreign borrowings in all languages undergo a period of uncertainty concerning those grammatical characteristics that cannot be readily inferred from the source language. I have seen this as far back as 5,000 years ago (Ok, I wasn't there personally, but I have seen it in Akkadian writings where the gender of Sumerian words fluctuates depending on the scribe).
> Does that mean that Spaniards are starting to invent a gender-neutral form of expression ?
No. In Spanish, a gender-neutral form of expression in the mangled sense of the political correctness movement already exists, e.g., by using the passive voice. From a more academic point of view however, the masculine form is gender-neutral, same as in French (technically, it's the unmarked gender). If you are, however, referring to the development of a third gender, it's worth noting that as a Romance language, it still retains a few vestiges of the Latin neuter, e.g., "lo", "esto", even though Spanish itself never had a productive neuter.
Interestingly, even though your English is impeccable, I noticed that you are indeed French, as your screen name suggests. :-)
surely it'd be correctly written as "WhatsApp" in any country that uses the Latin alphabet, regardless of local pronunciation conventions?
Nike and Sega have unusual spellings, by the conventions of British English, yet we've not disolved into a quivering, linguistic mess.