LAS LENGUAS INGLESA Y ESPAÑOLA de Delfín Carbonell

  BILINGUAL BICULTURAL   In the early fifties, as a young boy, I crossed the Atlantic aboard a TWA Super Constellation propeller airplane from Madrid. After many hours, we landed at Idlewild Airport in New York. A tallish, thin, blond young boy reached America and immediately felt at home. “This is home at last”, I said to myself, and thus started my love affair with this country. What was it about Idlewild, the Greyhound bus that took me to Pittsburgh, a nine-hour ride, the people around me… It was a feeling of contentedness, of a certain joy, of adventure and emotion. All seemed new, fresh, and different, so different from my adopted city of Madrid, where I have never truly felt at home to this day. I had my first Coke, my second Coke, my third Coke during that long trip through Pennsylvania to Pittsburgh, the Smokey City, as it was then called. I was better off than most because I spoke English and was able to understand and make myself understood to the astonishmen...

  Hace años que vivo en Madrid. Mi estancia en la villa ha sido más larga que en Valencia o Pittsburgh. Sin embargo considero estas dos últimas ciudades como "home". En Madrid siempre he sido y sentido forastero y no por el trato o maltrato, o porque no me guste la ciudad... es que yo entré en Madrid, pero Madrid nunca ha entrado en mí. Y esto me recuerda el dicho "muchos entran en la corte y no la corte en ellos" que tiene, como toda la fraseología, múltiples interpretaciones, y que me viene al pelo para reforzar mi idea de que siempre podemos encontrar modismos en otro idioma, como el de "you can take the boy out of the country but you cannot take the country out of the boy." 

  Of course, written letters are always silent until we speak them, but as Spanish is "easy" to pronounce (so people think, search me why!) it is believed that there are no "catches" to the sounds of Castilian. Did you know that in Madrid, Madrid is pronounced "Madrí" with no "d" sound? And worse still, many madrileños will say "Madriz", with the Peninsular "z", like "think." Listen to any version of the Mexican Agustin Lara´s  musical composition "Madrid," a chotis.  Did you know that many people forget the sound of "j" in reloj (reló)? And yet they will pronounce it in the plural, "relojes."  Did you know that the sound of pleasure, measure, treasure exists in Argentinian Spanish: Yo, pollo, whereas in other localities is is a plain sound like "io, poio"? Did you know that Spanish does not have a "v" sound as in vase, vet, and that "baca" and "vaca...