Arroz Con Beans

And why English salsa SUCKS.
I say English salsa sucks, but I digress. Wayne Marshall asked about English reggaeton.

http://wayneandwax.com/?p=2015

One thing that is interesting about a certain failure of the genre to “crossover” (and let’s remember that the term originated in reference to race-segmented markets) is how little English-language reggaeton actually got produced. In that sense, it also seems different from previous “Latin booms,” which were quickly adopted and adapted for the (Anglo) mainstream. (I’ll have to digitize some of these Fred Astaire dance records sometime. Samba! Rumba! Cha Cha Cha!) Is there something less translatable about reggaeton (aesthetically as well as linguistically)? Or is there less need/desire to translate?

I have, as usual, a few ideas.I can’t find any other ideas on it and if Wayne and Raquel dont have the answers WHO DOES? Maybe if I google in Spanish I can find something, but I dont like to trudge through the kiddie forums too much to see what the word in the skreets is. So I am left to devise my own answers to satisfy my curiosity.

I’ll tackle aesthetics.

English words, no English SENTENCES cannot be made to easily fit reggaeton or salsa music which usually has AfroCaribbean Spanish lyrics. Just to hit the Spanish aspect and not even get into Africanized Spanish.

In English, to be intelligible one usually expects a certain amount of distinction, stops between words. In Spanish, it is expected that words run into one another. There is more elision and then linking to make utterances sound “right”. To distinguish between words one must know what the word is and where it ends. “yo loco loco y ella loquita” “yo lo coloco y ella lo quita”

An utterance in Spanish (and less so in English) may be treated as a single word for the purposes of stress/accent but really it may be multiple words.

For example, when I say “tu y yo” I dont say tu y yo. I say, ‘tooeyo” and I stress it as if it were a 3 syllable word. Doing that in English tends to make shit harder to understand.( I have recently noticed that I have been running my English together, I speak English 99% of the time, but hear Spanish almost 100% of the time I am not at work.So I say things like “hellowas up” and “Idoneknowwhu thefuckee wants frummee” I take gonna, wanna, Imma 1 step tooo far.)

Anyway, for the sake of rhythm its a little easier in Spanish to break words in half or append words onto the words before them.

Why the helll am I writing this? I am 100% sure this has been done by someone who knows what they are talking about.*googling*

Here-> All empahsis below is mine, that’s what I’d be typing it someone hadn’t already done it for me.

http://www.champs-elysees.com/products/spanish/spanish_pronunciation/pronunciation.htm

Meaningful language does not normally consist of individual isolated words but rather of a succession of phrases………….Because the ways in which Spanish words are orally linked produce fusions or unexpected dislocations of word boundaries.

(It happens in English, too, though far less commonly: Did she say new dance or nude ants? Did he say ice cream or I scream?) This constant, universal, and perfectly natural phenomenon of Spanish speech can play tricks on your ear and thus impede your comprehension of what you hear. How to get around this problem? Simple. You need to assimilate into your own Spanish speech habits The Big Secret of what actually happens phonetically when native speakers put words together in sequences. Here it is, friends:

THE BIG SECRET

To use spoken Spanish naturally and correctly, as collections of phrases or sequences of syllables rather than as individual artificially spaced out one after another, think of each whole phrase as one long word, subject to the linking process mentioned above and treated in detail in Section II, below

. The basic idea is that in Spanish almost all interior syllables in a word or phrase begin with a consonant and most of them end with a vowel. Just remember this critically important fact: Most of the syllables of the full phrase will begin with a consonant regardless of where its component words begin or end. And as often as not, it sounds as if the boundary between one word and another has shifted or disappeared altogether.

I tell people who want to learn Spanish to watch telenovelas with Spanish closed captioning on, it helps them to sync what they read with what they hear and learn to hear the word breaks that they see.

From wikipedia

In Spanish poetry the meter is determined by the number of syllables the verse has. Still it is the phonetic accent in the last word of the verse that decides the final count of the line. If the accent of the final word is at the last syllable, then the poetic rule states that one syllable shall be added to the actual count of syllables in the said line, thus having a higher number of poetic syllables than the number of grammatical syllables.
If the accent lies on the second to last syllable of the last word in the verse, then the final count of poetic syllables will be the same as the grammatical number of syllables. Furthermore, if the accent lies on the third to last syllable, then one syllable is subtracted from the actual count, having then less poetic syllables than grammatical syllables.

Interestingly, Spanish poetry uses poetic licenses, unique to Romance languages, to change the number of syllables by manipulating mainly the vowels in the line. For example:

Cuando salí de Collores,
fue en una jaquita baya,
por un sendero entre mayas,
arropás de cundiamores…

This stanza from Valle de Collores by Luis Llorens Torres, uses eight poetic syllables. Given that all words at the end of each line have their phonetic accent on the second to last syllables, no syllables in the final count is either added or subtracted. Still in the second and third verse the grammatical count of syllables is nine. Poetic licenses permit the union of two vowels that are next to each other but in different syllables and count them as one. “Fue en…” has actually two syllables, but applying this license both vowels unite and form only one, giving the final count of eight syllables.

“Sendero entre…” has five grammatical syllables, but uniting the “o” from “sendero” and the first “e” from “entre”, gives only four syllables, permitting it to have eight syllables in the verse as well. This license is called a synalepha (Spanish: sinalefa). There are many types of licenses, used either to add or subtract syllables, that may be applied when needed after taking in consideration the poetic rules of the last word. Yet all have in common that they only manipulate vowels that are close to each other and not interrupted by consonants.

Some common meters in Spanish verse are:

* Septenary: A line with the seven poetic syllables
* Octosyllable: A line with eight poetic syllables. This meter is commonly used in romances, narrative poems similar to English ballads, and in most proverbs.
* Hendecasyllable: A line with eleven poetic syllables. This meter plays a similar role to pentameter in English verse. It is commonly used in sonnets, among other things.
* Alexandrine: A line consisting of thirteen or more poetic syllables.

I um, once counted the syllables in an African Salsa song from the Conga to Cuba cd. 7 syllables, I think I also them tried to cipher out the abba aabb or abab form of the verses but by then I was really tired because the shit was neithe Spanish nor English and I was having a hard time writing it. BUT it made it easier because I had no words to interfere with properly counting syllables as opposed to words, and because it DID fit the music it was almost like Spanish.

I think after that I tried to see if the words in Mayor Que you had the accents in clave. For some reason I became convinced that the percussive consonants in reggaeton fit the beat of the drums in clave and that one could hear a tongue click or lip pop just as one would a drumbeat if the music were being drummed and not sung. Then I went to bed and shelved this subject for a year because no one earth but me cares about this and I dont even know why I care.

ANYWAY…

And that is reason one. Spanish speech and poetry are not using the same rules as English. Word placement in reggaeton and salsa can be harder because these are genres created or developed in Afro-Hispanic communities and the music and lyrics are a unit, they fit one another. English rhymes don’t fit well.

I shall think up more tomorrow and try to back it up with some references.

Tomorrow’s topic, the percussive qualities of Africanized Spanish in Afro-Latin music due to the frequency of words with consonant pairings not frequently found within english words. Bomba vs bomb, songo vs song, tumba vs thumb, and some shit about the “muting” of the final plosive consonant when there is no trailing vowel to follow. Im tired, I’ll figure it out manana.

Then I’ll ask myself some questions about the need or desire to translate reggaeton into English. I will say this, AFAIK most reggaetoneros in PR are somewhat bilingual and could be doing this in English if they choose. All of my pillow talk is in Spanish, and the majority of those who hear it are bilingual. That happens to be a space where I want to use Spanish.

http://www.neurosciencemarketing.com/blog/articles/language-personality.htm

Do bilinguals have two personalities? A special case of cultural frame switching, published by researchers at the University of Texas, shows that bilingual individuals exhibit different personality characteristics when speaking different languages.

Lead researcher Nairan Ramirez-Esparza, tested individuals who were bilingual in English and Spanish for various personality traits, and found that the subjects answered the questions differently when asked in English and Spanish.

Ah, revealing a hidden belief of mine. Im laughing at the idea that someone would want to hear reggaeton in English or make it in English since everyone who listens to reggaeton can speak Spanish. I cant see a need for it.”Translate it into English? For WHO?”

It never occured to me that an English speaking person would want to make reggaeton and so of course would do so in English. I mean, chachacha can be danced in gowns and high heels while the waiters pour champagne, sure thats gonna be appealing to the mainstream. African Americans get the foreign itch scratched by dancehall and the urban one scratched by hiphop, so where’s the need for reggaeton? Plus, most AA’s, but not all, that I know find reggaeton music very very messy and cacophonous. (I accidentally wrote “cacaphonous”, shitty sounding, haha)

Then maybe somethin about nasalization because I like that.

*(One of my names has 2 “pre-nasalized stops” in it. I have mentioned a father who lived in Tanzania for over a decade a brother and stepmother who speak Swahili, no? Every person I know from an Afro-Hispanic culture thinks it is an absolutely beautiful name,”euphonious”. Spanish speakers from countries with less of a Bantu linguistic heritage are indifferent to it. English speakers say WTF.)

Here, have a link, I may get busy again and not take this topic up for another year.

http://books.google.com/books?id=U0xyRU7QoK4C&pg=PA239&lpg=PA239&dq=pre-nasalized+stops+spanish&source=bl&ots=JVXF-DE6_C&sig=q08dvdFVgLIV6yFYwEn_VRf3HPE&hl=en&ei=KhdESuSOAsiptgfZxMC5Ag&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4

Prenasalized stops, that is, homorganic nasal+stop elements that behave as single phonological segments, raise a number of interesting questions concerning the relationship between phonological units and timing in speech. Do complex phonetic elements of this kind occupy the same duration as simpler elements, such as plain stops or nasals? Do prenasalized stops have the same timing pattern as a phonological sequence of nasal plus stop? How do prenasalized stops act with respect to rules which adjust the duration of neighboring segments? For example, would a vowel before a prenasalized stop be shortened by the widespread rule which shortens a vowel in a closed syllable (Maddieson 1985)? It has been argued that the status of prenasalized stops as single segments is directly related to their duration. They have been defined as nasal+stop sequences with the duration typical of other single segments (Herbert 1986). He, and Sagey (1986), in her dissertation on complex segments, both indicate that they would expect phonological consonant sequences to have longer durations than single segments regardless of whether the single segments are phonetically simple or complex. On the other hand, Ladefoged and Maddieson (1986) suggest that there is no demonstrated phonetic difference in timing between nasal+stop sequences and prenasalized stops. Purported language-internal contrasts between these elements actually involve a difference between geminate and single nasals before stops (as in Sinhalese), or between syllabic and non-syllabic nasals before stops. They suggest that deciding if a nasal+stop element is a prenasalized stop is not a phonetic issue but one which concerns solely the phonology of the language in question.

I swear to GOD I better get an A when I finally take my class in phonetics.I better get an A in all of them, but the department head worships Argentina and if I ever wrote shit about reggaeton she’d blanche, no pun intended. Maybe when Luny and Tego are 80 it will be an acceptable topic, till then Imma be working on Neruda and Sabines and Lorca.

Is it just me or does your head hurt too? Believe it or not, at work I specialize in saying things as concisely as possible,lol. I dont wanna use up my lifetime word quota at work, Im saving them for here.