Mexican Spanish [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION introducción When the Spanish conquistador Hernándo Cortés landed in Mexico he was confronted by a vast and complex Aztec civilisation in which NahuatI and Mayan languages predominated. It's difficult to imagine how Cortés, with his relatively small band of followers, managed to overthrow one of the most powerful empires of its time. The key to the conquest of Mexico was not brute force but language. As every Mexican knows, it was the indigenous mistress of Cortés - a Mayan girl known as La Malinche - who facilitated the Spanish conquest by acting as an interpreter between the warring parties. Though reviled by many as a traitor, in recent years she has been reinvented as a symbol of Mexico's unique hybrid culture. In many ways, the multilingual La Malinche is also the mother of Mexican Spanish, a language that still bears the birthmark of the early interaction between Mexico and Europe. Today Mexican Spanish at a glance language name: Mexican Spanish names in language: espanol, castellano, espanol mexicano language family: Romance approximate number of speakers: 98 million close relatives: Castilian Spanish, Latin American Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese donations to English: tomato, chocolate, avocado, coyote has evolved from that first significant encounter. Variations in grammar and pronunciation distinguish Mexican Spanish from the Castilian Spanish spoken in Spain. Mexicans do not 'lisp' the letters c and z, as the Spanish do, and the use of the Spanish form vosotros ('you' plural) is limited to remote areas of the southern state of Chiapas. Perhaps the most obvious distinguishing feature of Mexican Spanish is its colloquial vocabulary