SPANGLISH

DUNGLISH (Yeah, from Dunglish - posting now, back from their summer holidays) ...

It’s not really fair to call this Spanglish, a mix of English and Spanish that makes me think of East Los Angeles, but ‘Cataglish’ (Catalan and English) sounds terrible. Anyhoo, this was spotted in Barcelona, a city that I can safely say is very easy to get around in in Spanish, Catalan, English and just plain pointing at things.

But this is just funny because the Italian is apparently good and the rest goes ‘de mal en peor’ (’from bad to worse’). The French has spelling mistakes, as it should be ‘français’ (odd, since the Catalans use the ‘ç’, as in ‘Barça’, short for ‘Barcelona’). The European French as opposed to French Canadians would argue it should be ‘nous parlons français’ (’we speak French’) as opposed to the impersonal ‘on’ (’one speaks French’), which almost looked familiar to me.

And I have a theory about the ’speak English’, which is giving an order to speak English. The Spanish, and maybe the Catalans, remove the personal pronoun in front of a verb when they speak. The idea is that when reading the verb, you know who’s talking. This is true in Spanish, but not in English, while in French it’s not allowed. Hence, the commanding tone. But my theory doesn’t work with the rest, which is why I posted this mess in the first place.