When I went to Chile I was about to undertake a cross-country move across the US. Everybody I spoke to in Santiago couldn't imagine a country where you can drive a massive distance like that and move from one major metropolis to another. At the time, I thought they were just reflecting on the fact that Chile is a country where 40% of all people live in one metro area, so there isn't another huge metro area to move to.
Looking at those maps, I understand their incredulity. Because of the shape of Chile, you can drive a similar distance and basically cover the entire country, rural, urban, and suburban. It's both a large country and a small one at the same time.
My first ever look at the states was out the window of a plane flying to NYC from the Bahamas at night. Straight up the east coast. Mind blowing. To my eyes it was one enormous city without any meaningful separation all the way. I was expecting to be surprised by the scale of the usa and yet it was way beyond what i could imagine.
"BosWash" was the term E.F. Schumacher used for the east-coast conurbanation, in 1973. Boston-New York-Philadelphia-Baltimore-Washington. In Small is Beautiful: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Is_Beautiful>
The Concepción metro area is 1 million people, Valparaíso/Viña as well. Chileans love to point out that there isn't much outside of Santiago but it's not really true.
is 1 million people a lot? I lived most of my life in metro areas of 15-30 million. when I finally ventured out and saw so many famous places at 1.5 million or less and how I could drive in and then back out of their downtowns in just a few blocks I was kind of shocked on how small most places are
I was mostly bringing up the 5.2 vs 6.4 both under Metro area.
The CSA isn’t necessarily relevant, but a reasonable agreement exists that it’s really the same metro area. The beltways (495, 695) are less than 25 miles apart. Laurel, Maryland is 20 miles from both downtown DC and downtown Baltimore. Meanwhile the other cities from Richmond to Boston are 95-200 miles from each other.
I knew someone whose tech support job would regularly send them to both cities in the same day. Apparently many companies located between them so they could easily serve both.
You can’t just look at distance and judge. I knew guys who lived north of Baltimore but commuted every day to the Pentagon. That doesn’t make Baltimore and DC two parts of the same city.
Just like there are people who commute from New York to London, or vice-versa. NyLon is a thing, but that still doesn’t make them two parts of the same city.
They expanded the CSA to include Baltimore so as to reduce the average salary rate, and thus they didn’t have to pay for COLA wage increases.
From late 1989 to mid 1998, I lived in various parts of Northern Virginia and the Capitol region of Maryland, and made many trips to Baltimore. Totally not the same metro.
I think it's less about distance and more about culture. DC and Baltimore are vastly different in culture, recreational activities, industries, demographics, etc. People don't live downtown in one and work in the other. The commute would kill you. Average income in DC is nearly double what it is in Baltimore.
Like, imagine SF and Oakland, but with an extra 30 miles in between.
I don't have a link but I remember reading an article/Blog post linked here on hn where a software developer was in San Francisco one evening, saw the cops arresting someone, went to say something, got arrested himself and they held him over a long weekend or something in terrible conditions, and the police officers said some terrible things like the person he arrested was overpaid and the officer had to live in Oakland or something.
I've never been to SF/Oakland but this is one of the first thing I think of when the place is mentioned. How is the employee to blame for structural/ societal issues. What kind of idiot dumps their frustration on just some passer by?
> DC and Baltimore are vastly different in culture, recreational activities, industries, demographics, etc. People don't live downtown in one and work in the other. The commute would kill you. Average income in DC is nearly double what it is in Baltimore.
Culture, recreational activities, demographics, etc. vary quite a bit in other "twin city" type situations as well. Dallas and Fort Worth are about as culturally different as you can get at that distance, and of course people don't live downtown in one and work in the other - people are making a very specific choice with very specific tradeoffs when it comes to living in a downtown area in general, and those don't make sense if you're not explicitly spending most of your time in that area. Income is about the only thing that doesn't hold true in the Texas and Minnesota examples listed elsewhere in the comments, and DC has some conditions fairly specific to it that cause that.
Instead of a shinkasen running every six minutes, we get a low-speed train that runs about once an hour, and only during working hours. If you work past 8 PM you're going to have to find another way home.
I don't really know what's far enough, but culturally they consider themselves entirely distinct. People from one almost never work in the other; the trains that do exist are for bringing people from the suburbs.
Even those suburbs are fairly distinct. There's a dividing line at Columbia, MD where people go both directions, and nearly everybody else affiliates themselves with one city or the other.
Another way to look at it: they have separate sports teams. They're not even rivals, because they play in different leagues. Within the city fans are pretty exclusive, and the other city's teams aren't of interest.
Maybe that would change if it were possible to live in one and work in the other, or if they commonly shared night-life or restaurants or leisure. Instead, the other city is a full-day trip, not a jaunt across town.
None of what’s in this comment or others reflects my experience at all. I work in DC and have had many colleagues who live in downtown Baltimore and Baltimore suburbs, even suburbs north of Baltimore. They have been Orioles fans. Some have driven, others take commuter rail. I live in a suburb that is closer to DC but the commuter pattern on the highway reflects traffic flow to the Baltimore area in the morning and away from it in the evening. My wife and I work in downtown DC and we live closer to DC than Baltimore, but we routinely attend cultural and recreational events in Baltimore and of course fly from the Baltimore airport. We had memberships in the National Aquarium (in Baltimore) and have taken our kids to the Maryland Zoo. They have never been to the National Zoo in DC.
Baltimore and DC are absolutely one metro, just like Dallas/Fort Worth and Minneapolis/Saint Paul. That two cities have distinct identities doesn’t mean they aren’t one metro.
A fair point. This list has 468 above 1 million and I think that's the urban boundaries and not metro
I hadn't actually googled concepcion, 200,000 in the urban area is quite small. It would be interesting to somehow workout the percentile of population living in a larger/smaller place.
In my book, 1M people is when a city starts to become a “proper” city. It’ll host major events, invest in public transit (beyond bus), have extensive infrastructure, have extremely thorough airport service, likely have many walkable neighborhoods, and generally feel like a city.
Under 1M and the city center tends to be very small with most people driving from the suburbs.
>Under 1M and the city center tends to be very small with most people driving from the suburbs.
That's a very US or modern Asian city view. In my corner of the world, the Rhine-Ruhr area and the Franco/German/Benelux region almost all cities are < 1 million but you'd be hard pressed to not call Ghent or Rotterdam[1] or Düsseldorf a proper city.
probably the median income of the area also goes into it, 1m with low median income might perform at about the same as 800,000 with high median income.
European cities - compared to U.S at least - also maybe have the factor of how long it has been a city to contribute to how much "a city" it seems.
Edinburgh, where I have lived/worked for 40 years and has a population of just over 500K has all of those and more: major arts festivals, good train and growing tram networks, good airport links, very walkable and certainly "feels" more like a city than a lot of much larger cities.
“This is a city of shifting light, of changing skies, of sudden vistas. A city so beautiful it breaks the heart again and again.”
the "City of Edinburgh" may be 500k people, but the metropolitan area is bigger - once you include the outlying towns which people commute from there's more like 800-900k people.
We're talking metro area, not city. If the city is 1M, it's metro area is likely 1.5 to 3 million. If the metro area is 1m then the city is probably 750k to 350k people.
The post above said "The Concepción metro area is 1 million people" which means the city itself is much smaller. In fact, Wikipedia says it's 200k people, 1m metro area
Just a quibble about the metro to city population ratio... I think it's usually a lot higher than 1.5 or 3 to 1. Portland where I live has a population of around 650k (city) and 2.6M (metro). So about 4:1. And it's one of the less spread out metro areas in the US. The LA metro has about 18.5M and the city itself about 4M. Chicago is also about 4:1. NYC is the exception at closer to 2.5:1.
Just having grown up in LA (the city), I think there's a cognitive bias in these places against recognizing just how freakin large they are when you live there. There are large corners of my home metro area I've never been to at all, whose people I would almost never interact with... and I say that as a former taxi driver! Of course, taxi driving in LA was always balkanized so you'd need separate licenses to pick up in this or that suburb... very Snow Crash-like even in the 90s.
...in America. In Eastern Europe, even 100k-200k city will have trams or trolleybuses, and will have most people living in condos near public transit, not in suburbs.
As someone who lives in a city with 1.5 million people... growing up I felt pretty underwhelmed by our downtown and you can indeed pass through it in a few blocks. The first time I went to Tokyo I felt like I was in a real city. But then again, it's one of the largest cities on earth, so of course it feels like a real city. Though cities like mine are far more common.
That is a really nice bit of information communication. Hat's off! I feel like I learned a lot and that always makes me happy.
One quibble. At the end it mentions why Mexico's west was of interest to the Spanish, but neglects possibly the most important part - it was where the Spanish galleons from the Philippines first landed after the grueling trip across the Pacific as detailed beautifully in Neal Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle".
Clavell wanted to write a second novel because "that separates the men from the boys".[21] The money from King Rat enabled him to spend two years researching and then writing what became Tai-Pan (1966). It was a huge best-seller, and Clavell sold the film rights for a sizeable amount (although the film would not be made until 1986).[22]
Interesting. I’ve had a pet research project that had a lot of anomalous cultural data points pointing into ancient Japanese pollination in places where many would be surprised by today’s “standard history.” It seems there’s deep connections across South America to Japan.
I was recently watching some YouTube videos about early contact between Europeans and Japanese. A lot of that was contact with Portugal, and from there they had contact with Spain and Italy, so they did go to Iberian colonies in the new world.
Just under 2000 Spaniards have this surname, and to this day they primarily reside in Seville province, which was long the only allowed port of entry to peninsular Spain for imported goods from Spanish overseas territories.
i'm pretty sure there are aztecs and mayas who go to the philippines and southeast asia to fight today (to fight drug lords and the dictatorship of myanmar, respectively)
I'm also wondering if the Andes are steeper than the Rocky mountains? Some quick Googling suggests that might be the case but I'm not getting a definitive answer.
Gradual elevation is certainly easier to build roads across than a cliff, and might be another reason there's less east-west divide in North America.
Basically, going east<->west is nearly impossible at scale, so moving an army is not going to happen if there is any resistance.
And going north<->south is so easy, that anyone doing it could likely cover the whole country pretty quick. So odds are, if there were two countries in that area, there would be just one pretty quickly.
Definitely one of those ‘geography defines the culture and the borders’ situations.
My key takeaway from this article is that the best place to go see the Milky Way is deep in the Amazon rainforest… where the tree cover is nearly 100% and there isn’t a single road for a hundred miles.
That’s a neat collection of graphics. I’m curious how bespoke the creation process is for each graphic or if this is something everyone just does in ArcGis or similar.
That last graphic about the Western US being the only other candidate is interesting because the two sides of the Rockies weren’t connected by a highway until the I70 over Glenwood Canyon was completed in 1992. Before its completion, the western and eastern halves of Colorado were practically different states and it took the interstate highway project half a century to get there because the terrain was so challenging.
Rather, go to Atacama, in Chile. It's a desert with pretty transparent air and little to no clouds, far from anywhere, and easier to traverse than a forest.
It's also rather closer to the South pole, so not as hot as Amazon.
Apparently the desert in Kashmir (I think Ladakh specifically) is also excellent for astronomy for similar reasons - a dry desert, cool due to its altitude, and also benefits from thinner air causing lesser distortion.
I've been on a dark ship in the middle of the ocean and that was pretty good for stargazing, though I guess Australia might be a tiny bit better due to less reflective surface (compared to the ocean)?
Well if you're running uBO and still need to login to see the picture, then uBO isn't helping avoid the login obviously. I'm running Chrome with uBO and Privacy Badger and a few other extensions, so you might want to try PB.
I remember feeling, once, that night time was when everything in the universe could be seen, and daytime was when we slept in the shade of the sun, away from it all.
We had Japanese exchange students in High School, and the teachers stayed in our house (Mum & Dad were teachers). Even though I was only ~15, I have a very strong memory of the 50, 60 and 70 year old Japanese people staying outside until all hours stargazing.
The most amazing sky I’ve ever seen was when I arrived in Urubichá in Guarayos region of Bolivia in 1998 before the electricity arrived in the area. I traveled by bus to visit my friend’s childhood home. The bus only went to the big city an hour away so I road in the back of a jeep the rest of the way, at night. I remember vividly not understanding what this super-bright light was in the sky. I know now it was either Venus or Jupiter, but it looked artificial because it was so much brighter than I was used to seeing.
Venus is known as either the ‘morning star’ or ‘evening star’ depending on where Venus is in its orbit relative to Earth.
It actually just recently (start of June) went behind the sun; it’s still too close to the sun in the sky to really be visible at all at the moment. As it moves further out from behind the sun it will start being visible in the evening sky in late July right after the sun sets, so it will be the ‘evening star’ again for the next eight months or so before it passes in front of the sun, disappearing from view for a bit, then comes back as the morning star next summer.
Fair point about the exact terminology but those are tiny two lane roads with impassable grades for the majority of commercial traffic. The term highway has drifted in colloquial use (hence your use of the word “was”).
Yes, they were two lane roads. But no, they did not have impassable grades. Neither Loveland nor Berthoud Pass were easy, especially in winter, but they did in fact carry lots of commercial traffic (though I would think twice about sending an oversized load over them). In fact, to this day the old two-lane road of US 6 over Loveland Pass is used to keep hazardous material out of the I-70 tunnels.
I mean, I remember around 1968-69, before they finished building Interstate 80 up Echo Canyon, and that tiny two-lane road had to take all the commercial traffic that there was on "the main street of North America".
No it hasn't. "Highway" encompasses a lot of levels of road. If you're referring to an interstate, say so. That's the only thing that actually means that, and only that.
> My key takeaway from this article is that the best place to go see the Milky Way is deep in the Amazon rainforest… where the tree cover is nearly 100% and there isn’t a single road for a hundred miles.
Pine Mountain Observatory, if you're on the West coast, has some of the darkest skies, best weather and stable atmosphere for good seeing. 24 inch telescope, too.
The problem with your takeaway is that you a) won't be able to realistically get deep into the amazon rainforest and b) the tree canopy would cover all of the sky ;)
As someone who once worked tangentially in search and rescue, please do not even consider this. The ocean is a serious thing, doubly so at night. Unless you are renting a boat large enough to come with its own staff, please do not just head over the horizon simply to see the stars. And fyi, the stars at sea move as the boat you stand on moves. They are brighter, but also more blurry.
Cruise ships dont have dark decks or other places to view the ocean directly at night. It would be like standing on your porch with the exterior lights of ypur house left on.
Avoiding light pollution is not really about seeing stars through light pollution. Thats for astronomers with telescopes. For human eyes it is more about being dark enough thay your iris can relax and let in more light. Try a dark forest, even a city park, surrounded by trees but able to see up. You will see more stars even if inside an urban area.
Also an area that is dark enough for ‘far enough’ that your eyes will naturally adjust to pick up these faint light sources. While some adjustment happens even in a few minutes, the difference between that and after several hours of darkness is mind blowing.
Most folks in a city likely have never been able to experience being able to walk by true starlight on a moonless night, and seeing clearly. It would be nearly impossible to get the right conditions even with a lot of effort.
A city park may be okay ish, but you’re unlikely to ever get the level of sight you’d get walking on a deserted playa in the desert. Not enough time with true darkness, and too much other light pollution.
Just drive an hour away from your nearest city, to the "rural" parts of your state. That's all you need to see a gorgeous night sky. You will see a beautiful sky even just a mile or so outside of a small town of 10k people.
I think the graphics have numerous sources and mostly/entirely aren't made by the post author. There are five different styles in the first six map images!
You should have very dry air for the best place, which I guess with all that Amazon rainforest thing, would not be your best option. Chile has the one of the driest deserts in the world.
Not really, that would probably be the north of Chile on the Atacama desert, there's a reason why the Extremely Large Telescope, Giant Magellan Telescope and Vera C. Rubin are being built there.
Watching this footage of the Very Large Telescope in Chile was the first time I really grasped that we're all together on a rock tumbling through the vastness of space: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFpeM3fxJoQ
It wouldn't give you the bombastic views you are used to from press realeases.
Those are all longer exposure, at different wavelengths, stitched together digitally.
With your bare eye in the focal point of that thing you'd just see Jupiter and some of its moons, the Rings of Saturn, some extrasolar nebulae and some galaxies better than with common amateur telesecopes. Otherwise just more and brighter stars, with some more hints of color.
You'd have more immersion by using binoculars with a wide field of view, and low magnification, like 10 to 20, maybe 30 times. But the latter with a wide field of view are rather heavy, so bring a foldable camping chair to lie down on, and some contraption to have the binoc hanging down on you, easily movable, but not shaky. Or a tripod, but they are impractical for looking straight up. (with common binocular eye-pieces)
Pretty sure you can rent telescope time it's just booked so you might have to wait.
You can still go physically, there's tours and such. But it doesn't make sense for a physicist to go there when all the imagery is captured by a computer anyway.
Also, if you've been to those altitudes you know it's not a walk in the park either!
There are plenty of remote telescope services you can make use of. The one at http://telescope.live/ is probably one of the best known in the astrophotography communities I am a member of, but there are many others.
I love these maps, it’s an awesome collection! I make data vis maps for my day job and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that each of these are completely bespoke, made by different people, using a unique technique - python, hand drawing, ArcGIS, Blender, and even R can be used to make these, and I usually use deck.gl
They’re fun to make combining design, data, graphics programming, and lots of fiddling to get the tools to do what you want!
The sky from the top of Mauna Kea is ridiculous, and it's pretty easy to get there: fly to the big island of Hawaii, then sign up for the tour, I think it's less than $100. The milky way is stunning.
Just check the lunar phase before you book. Made the mistake of being in Hawaii during the full moon, so we didn’t get much of a view of the stars on our Mauna Kea trip. Don’t get me wrong - the experience of visiting to the top and watching the telescopes opening up was worth the trip, but we missed out on a real stargazing opportunity.
And we did see a fireball meteor, so that kinda made up for it. But I don’t think those are guaranteed.
My nomination for night sky viewing: Ölgii in western Mongolia (was there for the golden eagle festival). Clear desert sky, accessible by airplane, not a tiny town either.
How is the table of dialects constructed? It's obvious if two dialects are at 1, but what does it mean if they're at 0? They can't be mutually unintelligible, since that would make them different languages. I ask because the dialects spoken in Argentina and in Uruguay are practically identical, save for a few regional words. If the scale being used puts them at 0.35, then it makes me wonder about the usefulness of the scale.
Dialects can mean very different things hence the old joke "a language is a dialect with its own army and navy", recognizing that the issue is really political rather than linguistic. Many Chinese dialects (like Mandarin and Cantonese) are considered dialects of the same "Chinese language" for political reasons but are mutually unintelligible, whereas Danish and Norwegian (the majority bokmal dialect anyway) are considered different languages even though they are pretty mutually intelligible because Norway and Denmark are different countries.
As for how the table of Spanish dialects was constructed, the figure gives the link to the paper it was from [1]. Basically they measured differences in dialects by giving pictures of an item (the example shown is a pinwheel) and asking what Spanish speakers from different places called that thing. Given hundreds of different concepts you can see how close Spanish dialects are to each other.
You don't even have to go all the way to China. The English countryside has multiple so called "accents" that are basically unintelligible to a speaker of London English, with plenty of famous examples in popular media (e.g. [1][2]).
Similarly, Germany has plenty of mutually unintelligible dialects. They are all related to each other and any two geographically adjacent dialects are mutually intelligible, but as distance grows it becomes harder to bridge the gap (which is why everyone learns Standard German nowadays). Luxembourgish meanwhile is in every sense a dialect of German with French influences, but due to having an army is considered its own language.
Okay, so the article is wrong for using that bit of data for the argument. It doesn't tell you much about how well two people from two different places will understand each other. If two people are in the same place and one says to the other "¿me das la veleta?", but the other would have called the object "molinete", chances are they could probably understand what the other person is saying. What makes different dialects of Spanish difficult to understand each other is slang and accent, not different words for common objects. Like, if a Spaniard tells me "Mariana está en el ordenador", I'm not going to get confused about what he means even if I would have called it "computadora".
True, but that's like saying a British person wouldn't be confused by the phrase "the trunk of my car" said by an American even if they would would say "the boot of my car" themselves. The fact still remains than "trunk" is US dialect and "boot" is British, and that the dialects are different.
I'm not saying the dialects are not different, I'm saying the fact that they're different is separate from how mutually unintelligible they are. Correlated? Yeah, sure. Equivalent? Not even close.
Shouldn't that comparison be weighted by how frequent the words are? For example words in the top 100 usage would count for more than the top 1000 and the top 10000.
It would be a much different story if British English and American English had different words for "a car". Which, by the way, happens in Spanish dialects ("el coche" vs "el carro").
here (argentina, non-native) we usually say 'el auto' but have significant use of 'coche'. 'carro' means something different; using it for an automobile sounds mexican
but if you showed an argentine a picture of a car, they might very well say 'auto' while perhaps someone from elsewhere would say 'coche', leading to a basically incorrect point of difference being measured in this study between the two dialects
Why would it be incorrect? Sometimes two or three different words describe the same thing and that's ok. If you poll enough people you can get a rough idea if one version is more dominant that the other, if there's an even split, or if different regions in the same country prefer different versions. Similar to soda/pop/coke in the US.
You can design a study with a high level of data granularity. You could even track differences in pronunciation and grammar if you wish so.
because 'we usually say coche but sometimes say auto' is almost the same as 'we usually say auto but sometimes say coche', but they differ from 'we always say carro'. if a study is saying spanish is radically different in montevideo and in buenos aires, it's just wrong. this may not be the particular design error that resulted in these incorrect results, but it seems like a promising candidate
I think we're both in agreement. Perhaps my example of coche/carro was unfortunate and I didn't make my point clear enough.
A well-designed study, in my mind, would compare the usage of a varied bag of words. Starting from articles, pronouns, numbers, common verbs, then common objects, verb forms, less common adjectives, ending with uncommon objects and phrases. The compared words would be weighted based on their frequency. If two dialects have the same articles, pronouns, numbers, etc. and some differences in less frequent nouns, they would be similar rather than radically different - at least lexically. Things might look differently if we look at pronunciation.
I don't know what list of words was compared in the study linked in this subthread, so it's hard for me to say anything about it.
probably a better cross-atlantic example would be something like 'perambulator' where the other dialect doesn't have a conflicting meaning for the word
I agree with you, differences in pronunciation, cadence, etc. should be taken in account as well. Though measuring those could take longer, if possible.
> There is no universally accepted criterion for distinguishing two different languages from two dialects (i.e. varieties) of the same language.
The difference between language is more culturally and politically defined than linguistically; there are different langauges spoken in the world that have a fiar overlap and elligibility, and there are different dialects of the same "language" that are basically untelligable. It might be sensible to just consider all spoken systems to be "dialects" of each other, and comparing their similarity.
I agree. Argentine and Uruguayan Spanish are very close. I'd expect to have seen .85 or so. Argentine and Chilean Spanish are not that far apart either -- or at least they weren't 30 years ago.
I have no idea. Also there is no standard spanish even in Spain. Like Andalucian spanish and Domenican spanish have a lot in common but vary greatly with other forms of spanish.
When I was getting my degree, two of my classmates spoke Spanish as a first language. One was a transfer student from Madrid, and the other was an immigrant from northern Mexico. I was in the room the first time they met and tried speaking Spanish to one another. They couldn't understand each other and communicated solely in English after about 10 minutes.
The funny thing is that both Spaniards and Mexicans claim to use the most neutral spanish, but you'd find their idiosyncrasies rather quickly - spaniards' 'f' sound of the letter S, and the infinite modisms and particular mexican accent on the other hand.
As the Spanish empire extended its spread so widely the language grew pretty complex (as english did!) so not even the most "neutral" spanish speaking countries do it as the RAE intends.
On the other hand, Chileans really do speak their very own language.
This idea is somewhat prevalent among native Chilean speakers, but I respectfully disagree. Even under formal settings, many of the features of colloquial Chilean variants are present, and often an additional effort to neutralize the accent needs to be made to sound “formal enough” to other Spanish speakers.
One thing is that pretty much the only place you'll see formal chilean is in like, the news, or official government communication. We're not very formal people, so even in workplaces or school we wouldn't use 100% formal register.
Sure, that is largely true. But, to state that the formal register of Chilean Spanish is “probably one of the most understandable ones, accent-wise” of all available Spanish registers is, in my humble opinion, quite a stretch.
Goddamn, is that what professional news outlets sound like? It sounds like a YouTuber trying as hard as possible to sound cool or edgy. Dude, leave the coke for after the broadcast.
Where the announcer is actually overpronouncing while still keeping (expectedly) some elision. In your example, Boric’s formal register is closer to what one would usually listen.
> chileans are ok with people saying we don't speak well
I never claimed that, I am merely addressing your “one of the most understandable” statement.
I met my ex-wife in Madrid where I lived for 4 years and where she was from. That's where I learned Spanish as a second language. After we moved back to California, we obviously met and spoke to many Mexicans over the years. Zero problems communicating for her, ever. Spanish is still Spanish.
If not utterly false and defaming. ANY educated Spanish speaker could talk to any other one from the whole Latin America in the spot. We are not talking about hicks with a deep and harsh accent such as some Andalusian farmer and some Northern Mexican paisano from Nowhereland. (Kinda like mixing an Appalachian and a Scottish).
Spaniard here. I daily talk with Argentines. Maybe the grammar and slang get obtuse sometimes, but overall once we talk formal Spanish the issues on jargon dissappear.
Also, the Spanish Royal Academy for the language logs every word from Iberia to Mexico and the Patagonia at their online dictionary, so everyone can guess the meaning of a local word in the spot.
I call bullshit on this. I am from Spain, I have met many people from different Spanish-speaking countries including Equatorial Guinea (people always forget about them), and we rarely have any problem understanding anybody (unless someone is an idiot who doesn't want to be understood, it happens too).
This is just anecdata regarding two people I knew personally. As with everything, reality may be quite different in the aggregate and individual experiences will vary.
There literally is a standard Spanish, no? I understand it to be based on Castilian. However I understand your point that even within the country of Spain there are many dialects which diverge from "standard".
Not really. Just like English, the standard variety in each country is considered equally "standard".
> I understand it to be based on Castilian.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. As far as I know Castilian is just a synonym for the Spanish language (as opposed to other languages of Spain e.g. Catalan). So the variety spoken in Guatemala and the one in Tenerife are equally "Castilian".
Spanish native here, confirming that RSA is the institution that sets the language standard.
But, people always deviate from it, though in my experience in word meanings and pronunciation, never in grammar to a degree that it become intelligible to another Spanish speaker.
The toughest film to listen to for me was "The rose seller"[1] (1998), took me like 10m to get my ear accustomed to their pronunciation.
So is the Andalusian accent from a Northern Spaniard like me, it's close to the prosody and speech of the US Southern accent. The first 20 minutes understanding Risitas were pure hell. But you get used to it in a few days.
It's like some American trying to understand the Scott/Welsh (can't remember now) sheperd not exposed to it. I'm pretty sure they could be used to it in less time than a week.
There's "neutral" spanish, but it's less of a formal standard and more of a rough subset that people recongnize it's generally understandable to most people
It being so artificial means that it doesn't fit anywhere, even it if's becoming more common (Kids are growing up listening to Media dubbed to it, so it's not weird seing a Child "speak like a cartoon" for a while until their local dialect kicks in)
It is what I usually call the "TV" or "media" standard. Same in french, the french language you listen on TV is very uncommon if you actually talk to french people from different areas of France and it is not even common in Paris.
The differences between Spanish "dialects" are overstated IMO and closer to accents. No two Spanish accents are as different as the dialects of Arabic or dialects of Chinese are from each other. People will share anecdotes about not being able to understand different words(like straw, car, computer) but the underlying grammar is the same in all varieties. Im natively fluent in both English(US) and Spanish and I find English accents way harder to understand than Spanish ones. The only time Ive felt completely clueless listening to English was talking to a Scottish man.
The royal Academy of Spanish has the mission of promoting language unity, the American vocabulary is huge so a lot of words are really puzzling for people in other countries, but there is a common root that can be used.
Yeah, I was wondering about these two countries myself. Also it was very strange to see the Peru and Cuba correlation, those two dialects are nothing alike.
People from both countries can speak a version of Spanish that is mutually intelligible. But if you go into a high school (or even listen to adults that are being very casual) then it'd sound wildly different.
I speak Chilean Spanish. Distinctive characteristics include no use of vos; the "tú" conjugation is often "-ai" (cómo estai?) or "-i" (qué teni allí?); saying weón every sentence; using "po" for emphasis (sí po!); specific words like "fome" (boring), "la raja" (awesome), "bacán" (cool); phrases like "estoy cagado de hambre", "estoy chato", "pasarlo chancho", "cachai?"...
It's also very related to class, at least in Chile. Even I struggle to understand people in tougher neighborhoods of Santiago.
sorry, i was talking about the differences between buenos aires spanish and uruguay spanish. i totally cacho that chilean is a different language entirely, however much germán garmendia tries to pretend otherwise :)
The article mentions it, but I only learned recently that Bolivia did not used to be landlocked. Chile took Bolivia's coastline somewhat recently (late 1800s/early 1900s).
> The dispute began in 1879, when Chile invaded the Antofagasta port city on its northern border with Bolivia as part of a dispute over taxes. Within four years Chileans had redrawn the map of South America by taking almost 50,000 square miles of Bolivian territory, including its 250-mile coastline on the southern Pacific Ocean. Bolivia accepted this loss in 1904, when it signed a peace treaty with Chile in return for a promise of the “fullest and freest” commercial access to port.
Disclaimer: I live in Chile, but not a Chilean national(nor of similar ethnicity), and certainly not a historian.
The dispute is seen differently in Chile and is not as simplistic as Chile invading a port. In general i've gotten the sense that the general populace believes that Bolivia(with its secret alliance with Peru) had other intentions.
>In February 1878, Bolivia increased taxes on the Chilean mining company Compañía de Salitres y Ferrocarril de Antofagasta [es] (CSFA), in violation of the Boundary Treaty of 1874 which established the border between both countries and prohibited tax increases for mining. Chile protested the violation of the treaty and requested international arbitration, but the Bolivian government, presided by Hilarión Daza, considered this an internal issue subject to the jurisdiction of the Bolivian courts. Chile insisted that the breach of the treaty would mean that the territorial borders denoted in it were no longer settled.
>Ill-defined borders and oppressive measures allegedly taken against the Chilean migrant population in these territories furnished Chile with a pretext for invasion.
Yeah, you are missing the backstory for that, which another commenter mentioned. Bolivia violated a treaty they had with Chile, and also had a secret alliance with Peru. They violated the treaty so they would go to war with Chile, and then team with Peru and try to conquer Chile. However, Chile had a very recently professionalized army and navy trained by the Germans, whereas Bolivia and Peru had peasants conscripted.
(To this day the Chilean armed forces are amongst the most trained in the world.)
The result? Bolivia lost all of its coastline, and Peru also lost its southern territories.
You can summarize the war as in Bolivia and Peru fcked around, and then found out.
If you go to the Bolivian part of Lake Titicaca (home of the Bolivian navy), there is a statue with a sword pointing West saying something along the lines of "We are going to take back what is ours".
One of the most interesting drives in my life was Chile from the island of Chiloe to the Tatio Geysers in the Atacama. Just so many different climate zones, and all in relatively close proximity.
Chiloe and Puerto Montt were damp, cold, and fog-shrouded in Summer (Jan-Feb), very similar to parts of the coastal pacific northwest.
The area to its north, centered around the German-influenced town of Valdivia, was California-like. Very temperate in Summer, and very green. Lots of pastures and rivers.
The region becomes progressively more "Mediterranean" as you move further north; one gradually sees fewer pastures and woodlands, more vineyards, olive trees, and fruit orchards. Santiago is on the far northern end of this Mediterranean zone. The great wine regions are generally to the south and west of that capital city.
A few hours north of Santiago and all is desert -- but it's a fairly live desert, with all sorts of succulent plants and many types of flower. Most of the road traffic in these parts comes from copper miners and their work trucks.
Continue north and you're in a dry, mostly empty, moonscape. Antofagasta and Calama are nice enough towns, though, and the interesting drive from the former to the latter takes just two hours but sees you rise from sea level to +2000m. It's such a gentle and relentless slope that you barely notice it. Nothing at all like driving in the Alps.
I broke something in my rental car when I continued to the geysers at +4000m, but it was worth it.
> Just so many different climate zones, and all in relatively close proximity.
Another place like this, perhaps lesser in scale, is the Big Island of Hawaii. Its latitude means the trade winds are blowing from the same direction year-round, bringing moisture to the windward side (e.g. Hilo, HI with 120" average annual rainfall) and leaving the leeward side dry (e.g. Kailua-Kona, HI with under 20" average annual rainfall), on the other side of massive volcanoes. And you can go from the ocean to almost 14k feet in elevation in an hour's drive; this may be one of the only places in the world where you can do that.
All of this means that as you move around Big Island, based on the precipitation, humidity, and elevation, you're going to see wildly different environments mere minutes' drive from each other. It truly has to be seen to be believed.
I was recently in the big island and this was both unexpected and wild to me. The difference of a couple miles could have an enormous impact on the weather over time. We stayed a couple of days in Volcano Village and like clockwork it'd be rainy there but sunny or at least partly sunny just a few miles down the street. Then there are rain forests, cloud forests, deserts, and every thing in between.
It's expensive, and it's a long way away from anything else.
I've been twice and both times the Big Island was my favorite. Maui and Kauai are spectacular in their own ways, as are the few rural areas of Oahu, but there's nothing like the Big Island. The drive from Kailua-Kona to Hilo over the Saddle Road (which, in itself, goes to around 6600 ft) is spectacular, and if you have enough time to make a day of it, coming back around via the southern ring road is well worth it. If you get up early, Waimea and the surrounding area (esp the NW protuberance of land) are worth seeing as well. Huge variation in biomes in very short distances.
Just by the sea, beaches and small banana plantations. Go slightly inland and up the hills, you're in an arid region. Continue slightly further up, and you get into a lush, verdant forest. All within maybe 20 minutes' drive.
Best part? There's no airport on the island - you have to fly to Tenerife and take a ferry.
And yet another place like this is in Southern California if you drive in an easterly direction starting on San Diego and ending in the Salton Sea, going through Ramona and Julien. You go from an area with a Mediterranean climate to temperate deciduous forests to coniferous forests to cold, high-elevation desert to hot, low-elevation desert (Anza Borrego Desert). This is all within about 50 miles (80km). It's a fascinating drive!
>so many different climate zones, and all in relatively close proximity
Yes. Just mountain climbing in northern Patagonia (between Bariloche & Villarica, really only 100mi of north-south distance) became my favorite part of the world for your reason. In a single day (or two), we could walk in the dry, dusty bottom of a canyon dug out by glacier melt, cross through a humid jungle, rest on the shores of an alpine lake, pick your way across a massive rocky field of a'a lava, up a glacier and look down inside the caldera of an active volcano.
The only other place I have been that come close to having that amount of diversity of terrain in a limited area might be the Tetons/Yellowstone.
Torres del Paine in the south is pretty brutal to get to if you're not used to long flight but it is breathtaking. Definitely a bucket list trip if you enjoy nature and wildlife, hiking, etc.
It's nice, but unfortunately listed on nearly every tour guide of Chile, so these days it's flooded with tourists most of the time. You'll have a much better time seeing other places slightly off the beaten track.
During the summer months yeah, but I've been there last year during the end season and, although there are still lots of tourists, it's not overwhelming and some of the hikes were pretty chill.
Going straight to the Torres themselves will usually be crowded (depending on the time of the day). But some of the other hikes less so. I've done the W Circuit (a multi-day trek) and during some days I barely saw another hiker.
I hate visiting touristy cities but I mind don't mind it as much in nature areas. Mainly because the nature isn't changing itself for the tourists.
I visited Torres de Paine and it was refreshingly different from national parks in the US. On the upside, you can get water and basic snacks at the refugios which reduce the load you have to carry, and makes for an overall safer experience than unsupported wilderness backpacking but still with minimal impact on nature. On the other hand I did not like that they close a lot of viewpoints long before sunset.
"Nevertheless, recent paleoenvironmental studies performed within the Park indicate that fires have been frequent phenomena at least during the last 12,800 years."
So fires are a normal thing there, or they have tourists since 12,800 years ..
Yeah I hate that, but at first glance it didn't seem to be a huge problem in TdP compared to most other national parks around the world I have been to. Most people I encountered seemed quite responsible. Chile is overall a very well-educated country though, and TdP takes significant effort to get to compared to so it is perhaps a natural filter.
Vancouver when the cherry blossoms are in bloom is interesting, the different elevations and the different progress of the trees is fun to pay attention to.
I travelled to Chile earlier this year and visited Atacama and Torres de Paine.
The thing that boggled my mind was that you can't drive between the two without a very long detour through Argentina. Chile has literally no road linking the northern part with the southernmost part without going outside the country.
It is also mind boggling that rail is not more popular there. A long, slim country is ideal for high speed rail.
Actually you can cross the entirety of Chile by car if you don't mind taking a ferry that starts in Puerto Montt and arrives in Puerto Natales. It is 4 day trip, but the scenery is gorgeous.
Regarding the rail system, Chile had a great rail system that went from Arica to Puerto Montt with lots of spurs going into inner towns. However it was slowly dismantled and now most of the rails are in disuse, or used for the transport of goods.
There is still a main rail for passenger transport, but most people prefers taking the bus or driving because of convenience.
Looking at the map of southern Chile, it's pretty obvious why this is so. It's just immense mountains and fjords. Building a road across that terrain would be a major challenge, requiring many bridges capable of surviving harsh conditions. All to deserve a minuscule population? Chile isn't Norway...
Latitude-wise, Torres de Paine is comparable to northern Belgium than it is to Norway. Even Ushoaia, the southernmost major city in Americas, looks more like Belfast in the UK, or Gdansk in Poland, which are both into way more nicer climates than Norway. I just think that having some infrastructure in place, linking the southern parts of Chile with the rest, may be exactly what is needed for addressing the stounted growth there.
I tried to cross the border into Argentina north of Puerto Montt. I wanted to check out the Argentinian side for a day or two. But they wouldn't let me across the border with my rental car, and I got turned back. I suppose the rules are a little bit different in the far south?
If you want to bring a Chilean rental car into Argentina you need to obtain and pay for a specific permit at least a few days before you pick up the rental car. Maybe that was missing? When I crossed the border they were very thorough with checking this permit.
> If you want to bring a Chilean rental car into Argentina you need to obtain and pay for a specific permit at least a few days before you pick up the rental car.
Classic Argentinian bureaucracy, making the country lose money since time immemorial
Actually it is because you need car insurance for accidents against third parties. This must be bought before going over the border. Usually there are shops in border towns that can help you with the paperwork.
I don't know anything about the history of trains or carriages, but in the heyday of railway development in Britain (iron rails, steam locomotive, etc.) it would have been far less acceptable than today too. And still all trains I'm aware of/have been on have two classes of carriage. Indian trains have several, and similar cultural need for that I imagine (I don't really know anything about Chile).
I’m told that prior to industrialization there were areas along the Andes (in Peru for sure, presumably Chile as well) where you rarely if ever met the tribes living uphill or downhill from you. It was way easier to travel north and south.
Quite the contrary, the management of the different ecological floors was the specialty of the inhabitants of the Andes, even now. The same community owns and uses land at different altitudes, which can range from 1000 to 4000 meters above sea level. This generated an economy based on the exchange of goods along vertical lines.
Might have been an urban legend or someone confusing their locations.
There was a very similar model in California as well. Seasonal migration from the sea to the hills and back. Given the supposed patterns of settlement of the Americas maybe this is not particularly surprising.
It reminds me of the style of pop science books written in the late 19th and early 20th century. There's a nice charm in it, like it's trying not to be pretentiously complex.
This author wrote a number of pretty influential essays during the early pandemic advocating for mask use, social distancing, and other mitigations. He's a trained educator, so the effectiveness of communication is definitely no accident:
My gf is a trained educator too with two masters somehow related to education. She teaches 8th grade English but has also taught highschool.
She can't write or communicate at any level beyond typical hairdresser. Considering it's very hard to fail out of most upper level education unless you simply don't do the work at all, we really should stop giving people so much credit for just getting degrees.
It's what you do with it that matters and how you devote yourself on your own time that makes people great. And that's what the previous commenter was doing. Trying to give credit to some education system someone went through is taking away from the person that actually made something of themselves, almost always by themselves.
Side note, I graduated with a MechE degree from UC Berkeley. Decent grades. I can honestly say I learned almost nothing. I just did a ton of work they wanted. If I made something of myself in the engineering field, I promise it wasn't because of UC Berkeley.
Okay, fair. Some people are naturally gifted at these things, and others acquire the skills through extensive work in a non-academic context. I've been told I'm a pretty effective communicator/storyteller, and I certainly never studied it formally.
Apart from a few other factors, the biggest one that stands out is not stringing you along in a click-baity way, instead just asking a question and giving a direct answer right after the question and in simple direct words.
No dark patterns to make you spend a longer time on the webpage for ad metrics.
The author Tomas Pueyo grew up in a family of filmmakers. For his Stanford MBA he specialized in behavioral psychology, design, storytelling, and scriptwriting. I have to imagine that has some influence on his writing
Bingo. For all its flaws, Twitter threads can be a nice way of delivering a point. I think the character limit implicitly encourages a kind of brevity which you wouldn't get anywhere else.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading the post. A breath of fresh air among all the click-bitey and false buildup so common in content these days. PLEASE DO TRAIN THE GPTs ON THIS GUY
I thought it would be dense, but it was lighthearted and didn't take itself too seriously, and both shared information and fun questions to ask. I enjoyed the speculation which had not even a shred of political or social agenda anywhere in sight. Just pure fun.
I hate it. Seems to me it's full of clickbaits. "Find out what happens next", "What's going on?", "What's happening?", "So why is Chile so long, but not longer?".
I can't stand it to be honest and stopped reading because of this.
Another interesting fact about Chile is: no compass is needed. The mountains show where the East is. If the East is to your right you are facing North, otherwise you are facing South.
In fact, it’s so easy to know where North is that it’s very common to use cardinal directions when describing locations or meeting points in Santiago, as opposed to using landmarks. For example, when meeting a friend you may say “I’ll meet you on the north-eastern corner of the crossing of Pedro de Valdivia and Irarrázaval Avenues”, and everyone involved will know what that means.
Relatedly, one of the claims made about the Pirahã people is that they have no words for left and right in their language, instead they orient themselves relative to the river bank.
The coastal mountain range reaches heights of 3000m, it's not as easy if you are in the valley in between these mountains and the Andes because you'll be surrounded by mountains.
This is also true of long linear coastlines, such as the South Coast of England, where (ignoring small bays and harbours), if the sea is to your left (right) then you are facing west (east).
I was briefly disoriented when I stayed on the North coast of Cyprus where the situation is the opposite.
I had a similar feel driving through Croatia, although not as extreme: If you don't hit the sea or a border crossing, you are going in the right direction! (With a tau/2 ambiguity you can resolve using the sun)
Which was a bit confusing for me when I first entered the Schengen zone by plane. After a long flight I really wanted to believe my country code was CH
On the difference of Chilean Spanish to other "dialects":
> It’s the farthest region from Spain, so the least communicated to the rest of the empire, and hence the one that drifted the most from the homeland.
Er... if you look at the table (https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1272,c_limit,f_webp,q_...), Chile has quite a lot of red, but actually its Spanish is closer to the Spanish from Spain than that of other South American countries. So it looks like those have drifted further from "standard" Spanish, while Chile hasn't as much?
> So it looks like those have drifted further from "standard" Spanish, while Chile hasn't as much?
I think the chart is saying less about differences relative to Spanish Spanish and more about each regional dialect relative to the others.
In the table, the countries appear to be ordered (horizontally as well as vertically) by distance relative to Spain. Assuming there's nothing (like an ocean) to prevent the diffusion and evolution of language, given any cross-location in the grid, the cells nearest should theoretically have little to no gradient.
That's clearly not the case with Chile and isolation due to the Andes seems like a reasonable cause.
Colombia and Costa Rica also exhibit this effect, though, and I'm not sure why. FARC? They are separated by Panama and the PCZ; has the canal had an effect of preserving Panama's cultural ties relative to other countries at the expense of those of CO/CR?
These differences go back much further in the past, so FARC has nothing to do with it in Colombia (it’s spelled with an “o”). There’s a large linguistic diversity within these countries, which that table doesn’t reflect or account for.
Please note that there is no "standard" Spanish. In the Spain there are multitude of dialects and different variants. Even in the same region (e.g. Andalusia) you can find a ton of different variants. All of them are valid, as the RAE and the AAL make it clear.
Spanish can use four or five dialects, plus Vasque that is a totally different isolated language. But they all talk also bare metal Spanish.
Andalusians will change naturally to a more standard and fully intelligible Spanish when talking with somebody from Zaragoza (or even with Andalusian people that use a different accent). And any educated person can write fully understandable standard Spanish.
If you want to be more widely understood, it's better to sound more like the King of England than whatever your local variety is.
I tone down my (English language) accent when speaking to foreigners all the time. The point is to be understood.
I'm toning it down right now in this message. I want to be clear to a wider audience, not folksy.
So is Spain really telling other people the way they speak is "wrong", or is there simply a prestige accent, best utilised for international communication so the maximum amount of people can understand?
No, it has nothing to do with accent (phonetic). It's entirely language. They have a long history of "forbidding" words that are "real or not real spanish".
And by the way, counterintuitively, languages have NOT evolved to be better understood, but on the contrary, to "separate" or create cohesion in smaller groups.
"Spain" is not forbidding anything, the RAE [1] and the ASALE [2] are working together in keeping a common tongue. Don't allow some chauvinistic view to cloud your judgement.
There are royal academies in each Spanish speaking country. Is a very old institution that creates diplomatic links and a help net between countries on everything related with the Spanish dictionary. They solve doubts for free, or publish American Vocabulary dictionaries (so American people can understand other American people).
If you want to understand Spanish this is the best resource available
Not all people in this academy descend from the Borbons. Not all people there are from Spain. All are voted by their peers based in their perceived merits. Is a meritocracy, not a monarchy.
Some people appreciate the fact that there are experts on Spanish language trying to help everybody. Other will keep saying the equivalent to "Experts thing that are better than me" or "Death to conquerors. Mine is better, Murica!!". Everybody has their own choice, but the reward is ending with a language that nobody will understand. A very silly prize.
They have a long history of being proscriptive for anything that isn't "their real spanish" (that being of Spain). In latin america, we use a lot of neologisms ("commitear", "pushear", "mergear") and those are strictly "prohibited" by them, to the point that some spanish universities, following RAEs recommendations, fail students using them.
Any centralized institution that is in charge of overseeing a large and diverse number of countries that have evolved spanish over the past ~400 years is, in my eyes, set to fail.
Now, I do use RAE all the time to check definitions, but I see it as a "descriptive" body, in charge of creating some definitions. But even some of those definitions have to be "scrutinized" and can't be literally and blindly trusted. For example, check the definition of "gitano", which has a clear pejorative connotation. That is not wrong, is just the reality of how the "spanish speaking world" expresses itself. But should you take that definition by heart? I don't think so.
This is a clear example of "The Cathedral vs the Bazaar", as in Open Source vs privative software. I'm a hacker, I prefer a bazaar to a single institution dictating how we should talk..
You know that the RAE [1] work together with the Asociacion de Academias de la Lengua Española (ASALE) [2], right? You are showing the RAE in bad light, while both the RAE and the ASALE work together when creating new editions of the dictionary or new grammar rules.
About your "neologisms", no they are calcos or loan translations [3], they are not neologisms. They would be neologisms if they were new words, not copy of words from other languages.
Something that wasn't mentioned here before is that Chile is quite close in terms of grammar. Other South American countries supposedly have deviated more.
It's hard to understand some Chilean speakers but that's because they don't modulate their voice and cut or join words. But grammatically they are "correct".
There is a lot of Chilean slang and it's almost universally understood from north to south. But people are aware of it, it's usually not used at work. And then there are a lot of words which are just different, just about every fruit has a different name.
Chilean Spanish is heavily influenced by Spanish, German, Italian, and Croat immigrants from a pronunciation and colloquialism standpoint because those were the 4 main immigrant communities to Chile.
Also, Spain Spanish is not necessarily "Standard" (Castilian) Spanish.
My opinion as Spaniard and having a chilean close, is that Chilean Spanish is the closest to mine in terms of pronunciation. And to me what makes the biggest difference is not European migration but native words.
The main influences are Mapudungun and the Andalusian accent due to many early immigrants coming from that region. Neither German nor others were numerous enough to influence the Chilean dialect, especially in the capital (Germans and Croats mostly got lands in the south).
But cachái doesn't come from English-speaking immigrants. It's just one of the many English loanwords present in modern languages. And despite living in Valdivia –a city that once had street signs in German– I can't recall any other German loanwords aside from kuchen.
I was trying to say that loanwords are generally present in languages. Modern German itself has many weirdly used English words without any immigrants to bring them in the first place.
> Still influenced the dialect, didn’t it?
A few food names do not qualify as "influenced the dialect" for me. Mapudungun did influence the Chilean dialect, but German did not. I generally find the "German influence in the south" very exaggarated and a cover-up for the fact that the primary influences in the south have always come from Mapuche culture.
But there's a broad veneration of Germans and other Europeans, combined with a disdain towards indigenous peoples and their cultures, so the "German South" myth withstands, along with that one photo of Puerto Varas taken from the right angle to make it look like a German town.
> Modern German itself has many weirdly used English words without any immigrants to bring them in the first place.
This is correct. Case in point: Beamer.
> A few food names do not qualify as "influenced the dialect" for me.
For you. That doesn’t change the fact that the term has widespread use all over the national territory.
> Mapudungun did influence the Chilean dialect
If you want to stress the point, I’d additionally argue that a larger amount of indigenous-derived terms (including several words for vegetables) came from the Quechua. Although, according to your own set of criteria, a few food names would not qualify.
There are more Quechua words, but yes, a few food names are not "language influence" in any seruous way. French influenced English and Russian, Arabic influenced Spanish, but the only linguistic legacy of Germans in Chile are kuchen, strudel, and some weird last names used as street names.
More than any of that, it's influenced by Mapuzungun in a way other countries just aren't exposed - Argentina's Conquest of the Dessert was more brutal, and is the only other modern country where Mapuche land was.
Desert, n, stress on the first syllable, means a place without much rain, but it comes from the notion of being deserted so sometimes it just means an unpopulated area.
To desert, v, stress on the second syllable, means to leave/abandon something.
Desert, n, stress on the second syllable, is what you deserve "he got his just deserts"
Dessert, n, stress on the second syllable, is a sweet course of a meal that follows the main course. It has an extra s because of its etymology not its pronunciation.
I'm quite sure this mess was designed to be as confusing as possible.
Spain Spanish isn't "Standard" Spanish though. The closest thing to "Standard" Spanish is what the RAE prescribes, but no one listens to them. Insurgencies and protests were fought over this fact in Spain during the Francoist and Post-Francoist era (eg. Andalusian, Murcian, Canarian, Leonese)
Orale! Was not expecting to see us New Mexicans get called out here on Hacker News, but you're not wrong. It's surprising how much variation there is despite NM being so close to Mexico.
Argentinian here; yeah it's bullshit, also there's no single "Argentina spanish" or "Spain spanish", Andalusian is very different from Madrilean etc.
I have to say though that Chilean spanish is commonly considered quite hard to understand, they speak really fast with lots of mannerisms and "can't understand a single thing of a Chilean speaking" is a common meme in Argentina at the very least.
And even that data is kind of suspect, based on a simple glimpse at the screenshot, which shows idioms for "ISN'T IT?". Colombians definitely would say all of the following, unlike shown in the table:
A cada quien le va según quiere Dios, ____
- cierto?
- no?
- o no?
- si o no?
And actually would probably not say "si?" as shown. "Verdad?" might be heard, but maybe an older generation.
From my experience, (Portuguese native speaker who learned Spanish) Colombian Spanish is much easier than Mexican. And the worst Spanish, by far, is from the Dominican Republic. Chile is not that bad, it is quite close to Argentinian, actually.
The Chilean Spanish portion of the article made me laugh. I'm a Spanish speaker and the Spanish I speak is closer to Mexican Spanish. I could not for the life of me understand Chileans I met in Canada. Brings back funny memories of 2001 for me.
It completely ignores the influence of the indigenous languages in the "dialect" or variation of Spanish, which is actually a much better explainer than "distance from spain".
Huge mountain ranges separating people that are close in distance is a pretty classic mechanism of creating linguistic diversity / dialects in places that are physically close to each other. You see this with villages in various parts of Asia historically.
Indigenous language effecting Spanish is something that would effect everyone in South America, so even if you remove Spain from the table, Colombia, Chile, the Caribbean and Costa Rica will all stand out about how "different" they are from the rest of South America, probably from their physical barriers separating them from the rest of the continent.
I don't think that's a good hypothesis, because in that case, other countries with a huge colonized population such as Mexico or Perú would have less intelligible dialects as well.
Not all Latin-American countries experienced the same level of mestizaje and colonization. The southern part of Chile, in particular, was never successfully colonized by the Spaniards, and mapudungún, the language of the Mapuche people who live there has had (and continues to have) a tremendous influence on Chilean Spanish.
Dialect and language are sort of a "coastline problem". You can find variation between two neighboring villages if you like, but at some point you have to draw a boundary around a group of speakers and call it a dialect. I'd assume the common dialect of Santiago, where most people live in Chile, is considered "the Chilean dialect," but it almost certainly sounds different in rural areas.
There are regional variations, but the difference is less than what you would probably expect, applying mostly to intonation/cadence (more marked and melodic in the south, less so in the north) and some vocabulary. Most of the variation in Chilean Spanish is based on socioeconomic status, since Chile's income inequality is rather high.
> [...] intonation (more marked and melodic in the south, less so in the north)
Oddly enough, albeit anecdotal, this is true everywhere; in every country and every continent, people are looser in the south. That said, if it's also true for Chile then it means it's not related to the climate.
> in every country and every continent, people are looser in the south
Fun to think about, but I'm sure there are as many counterexamples as there are examples. In the Germanic languages, for example, no one could deny that Swedish or Norwegian are much more sing-songy than stodgy German.
Off topic, but that correlation matrix of "Spanish similarity" seems a bit odd. I'm from Argentina, and the spanish in Uruguay sounds practically the same. At least A LOT MORE similar than Cuban or Paraguay as it shows there.
When it comes to dialects and accents I find Chileans to be very easy to understand. I believe Don Francisco from the famous show Sabado Gigante con Don Francisco is Chilean. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A1bado_gigante It was aired in Univision and they ensure that the Spanish covers the Americas.
Another of my favorite shows that should be part of the article for culture sake is the Chilean show: 31 minutos. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/31_minutos where the Spanish super clear. Maybe is because is an educational show. Anyhow great Chile article. Thanks. Go Chile! Next time. (They are out of Copa America).
The Atacama Desert is so dry NASA uses it to stimulate Mars.
Wikipedia also lists five (!) observatories (one under construction, to be home to the Extremely Large Telescope), including the Very Large Telescope (built), ALMA (built), and others.[1]
It's basically as close as you can get to space while being on the ground on Earth.
[1] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atacama_Desert#Astronomical_observatories
Chile has an Antarctic claim going all the way to the pole. If you consider that, it's impossible to go further south
If you don't, then we still just run out of land in the Continent. Note that the neighbour competition also applies to Tierra del Fuego, as we've had tensions with Argentina through history over the control of Magallanes Channel.
Not a lot of people actually believe that Chile owns it, but it's true that our national registry allowed a guy to register it as his land (he needed to be a land owner to enter a club). It's used as a fun fact by most.
The Antarctic claim is taken seriously, though. It comes from The Treaty of Tordesillas
Absolutely amazing example of data journalism. Perhaps not all maps are created by the author originally, but such articles show very well how text paired with maps can greatly enhance the overall amount of knowledge transferred. ESRI have some similar articles in their Living Atlas using maps from it also. Not sure whether there is another like... easy/standard alternative, but the potential for such articles is huge. It is very possible that each serious article can benefit from some maps.
From the post: "You see how red Chilean Spanish is? It means it’s quite different. In the beginning of Grad School, I could understand all my Hispanic classmates, but I had a hard time understanding the Chileans!"
As a native Spanish speaker, I find this quite interesting. For me, Chileans are within the category of "easy to understand" while I might struggle a bit understanding some accents that the article qualifies as easy or normal.
What I find even more amusing is that one of the hypotheses for why Chilean is so different is that "It’s the farthest region from Spain, so the least communicated to the rest of the empire, and hence the one that drifted the most from the homeland.", and when you check the graph it's one of the closest Spanishes to Spanish Spanish ^^
In the 2000s the Chilean state railway company was involved in a huge corruption scandal as well as bad administrative practices. It’s been slowly recovering, but rail services in Chile still leave a lot to be desired.
That sounds like the kind of investment in the commons that a socialist would make. In 1973 the US encouraged a coup to ensure that no such investments were made (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Chilean_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...). Instead, we applied guns to the affected area and ensured that they would part with their resources as "fair free-market prices" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Boys). They've started the process of removing those policies, but only in the last few years.
If I had to come up with an excuse for not having trains, I'd chose that.
Objectively false: under the dictatorship half a country lived in extreme poverty, while the economic growth happened with the reforms of the democratic governments in the 1990-2000s.
I won't try to speak for the Chileans, but while I was there I did not get the feeling that they are happy about the intervention. The more I learned about my country's role in their history, the more surprised I was that they were being so nice to me. (I was there, along with my naiveté, to see a solar eclipse, so the cultural stuff I picked up along the way was a bit of a surprise).
"weon" is a corruption of the word "huevón", that means literally "big egg".
Is a polysemic word, but when used as adjective means "somebody with big balls"; by extension "somebody that spends the day sitting on their own testicles, unable to carry them"
So a huevón is "a lazy lad", "a douchebad" or simply "a dude" (colloquially and vulgar, but also playful if applied to a close friend).
The word is a minefield, some people will feel amused, other insulted, and is a faux pas with women. Better avoid it unless you know what you are doing.
The real value of this words are not in their literal meaning. Is an interesting question, in fact
When Chileans drop 'weon' ten times in two minutes in their conversations what they are saying is "I'm not Argentinian".
This is the real message.
Because Argentinians would use their trade mark "boludo" instead. Boludo is exactly the same that Weon. A boludo is somebody with "big balls". A weon is somebody with "big eggs". Both words have small differences in their meanings but are mutually exclusive (You either use one or the other). They are tribal tags.
If you want to do business with a Chilean, knowing were to casually drop 'weon' in an --strictly-- informal context is pure gold. It grants instant ghetto pass. Mexicans or Argentinians have their own equivalent words. If you use the wrong password the doors will close, so is risky and you need to dominate the context and use it sparingly. The overuse could be socially awkward and outdated (Imagine somebody from Sevilla going to Texas dressed on a fake cowboy disguise, pretending to walk like one and talking to you about business while spitting tobacco and flashing a weapon. Is 120% stoopid).
Spanish world is complex. Latinos can belong to several worlds at the same time. Lets take for example the singer Gloria Stephan. Gloria Stephan is a 100% USA citizen. But it was born in Cuba so felts Cuban traditions also as part of her culture. And her Grandparents are from the North of Spain, so Gloria Stephan identity is an USA-Cuban-Spanish-almost-Irish music star.
Most Latinos learn soon to adjust their different identities to the context appropriate, and wear or drop their accents and languages accordingly.
On the other hand, when somebody choose to say 'mergear' instead 'mezclar', the message for millions of people is: "look ma, I'm talking English. Almost". As the band Blur would say: "He'd like to live in magic America with all those magic people". Youngsters crave for acceptation and local friendship, so Spanglish or local accents are seen as something very valuable for making relationships
But grown people needs to adjust the message later. If you are a Chilean that migrate to Spain and keep saying "weon" all the time, what you are remembering to everybody is "I don't belong there".
And is the same problem with Spanglish. If you want to use English, by Pete's sake, talk in the most correct English that you can afford. Get the respect that you deserve, instead to introduce yourself like a wannabee latino redneck. If you need Spanish in business, the safe baby-proof choice is to learn neuter Spanish. Period. Will provide the most bang for the buck. But don't be ashamed to wear the multiple rich cloaks of Spanish in your benefit in the correct contexts.
I don't know but a Peruvian once told me that when God created South America he gave the Peruvians the titties from lake Titicaca and Bolivia got the shit left over.
Reading the title, my initial expectation was that this was going to be a Croatia/Bosnia-Herzegovina situation. Refreshing to read that most of the reasons here are geological/meteorological in nature.
I love how effective the article is at communicating. A digestible idea followed by visual example. Rinse and repeat. I think we could learn something from this for our documentations, or even Jira comments.
This article is awesome. I've always wondered why Chile is that shape and I didn't know about the Chilean dialect of Spanish being so far off from the others. Super cool.
Given that Chile only covers about nine degrees of longitude, the reasonable expectation is that it only has one time zone (excluding any far-flung territories and whatnot). I'm sure you're going to surprise me with the true answer :-)
I assume maybe the other one is to align more closely with Argentina or something? If you look at the time zone map, they just as easily could have had the whole mainland country on one timezone. Bolivia, Paraguay, and parts of Brazil share the same timezone as the northern part of Chili and are just as far east as the southern parts of Chili.
Easter Island makes sense, you don't necessarily expect islands that are far away to share the mainlands timezone. Antarctica is one that probably catches a lot of people since most time zone maps don't even bother to include it and there is no real population there.
> I assume maybe the other one is to align more closely with Argentina or something?
It has to do with differences in latitude. In winter, the southernmost region of Chile[1] was completely dark at around 4 PM with the old time zone. Staying on summer time for the whole year gives its inhabitants an additional hour of sunlight.
I was in Santiago for a month last year. It's a beautiful city and people are very friendly. I could not visit the desert in the north, but have heard wonderful stories about it. I really wish I am able to go there again.
From the same author, somehow related to the topics and maybe a bit more interesting : https:/unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/the-rain-shadow-effect
Am I misreading this or is that "How close is Spanish from Different Countries" graphic kind of jank? There's intersecting lines that are missing, like Puerto Rico and Dominican Republic.
The intersection between Puerto Rico and Dominican Republic is the 0.42 right above the "1" in the PR column (5th from the left).
If you imagine the full graph of all countries horizontally and vertically, there would be a lot of overlap (the PR column and DR row, and the DR column and PR row). So to save that redundancy, for all countries except Spain (very top) and Argentina (far right) you have to look around a bit to see where it crosses any other given country.
I'm a native English speaker. I learned Spanish pretty fluently in Chile, interacting with native Spanish speakers from several countries, and my personal experience doesn't entirely match the map. Chilean and Argentine are definitely harder. I don't think I've met a Venezuelan or Panamanian to compare. Colombian was the clearest, most comprehensible accent of any I encountered. Easier than Mexican and Peruvian that are both marked as easy on that map.
I'd assume there to be regional variations like most countries, right? Hard to blanket one way or another.
For example, my wife learned English later in life and can understand neutral/midwestern American fine, but has tons of trouble with southern and northeastern regional accents.
Hmmm. From my travels through Latin America, I would rate Colombian accents as by far the easiest to understand. Without exception, everyone spoke with clear diction and enunciation. I would definitely not rate it "very hard" - that would be reserved for the Honduran accent, which I found incomprehensible even spoken s-l-o-w-l-y.
Looks like they're rating "difficulty" as "difference from Spanish in Spain". Considering that Spaniards only represent about 10% of the total Spanish-speaking population, I'm not sure that's fair.
A lot of Spanish speaking memes and videos I see have this running joke that Chileans are hard to understand. I don't think it's a literal truth or meant to be taken seriously. They just hand pick a few examples of people who talk very fast, which exist in most Spanish speaking countries (in Spain, Andalusia would be it). There are similar videos in the same circles talking about how hard English is based on a drunk American redneck fisherman or Adele's working class London speech. It's just a meme.
These memes are popular in Latin America, it's definitely not just a Spain thing.
I saw an interesting video showing Argentines in the 90s vs Argentines today, both in BA with more or less the same age and status, and the former group had way more of that "Italian" sounding accent. I think it's going away or softening over time. A shame, because I like it.
many nation shapes don't make any sense. add in the wildly disconnected/schizophrenic sovereign territory of some countries (US and Russia among exemplars) and I've learned one must simply turn one's brain off when analyzing them. Its a circus.
It starts to make sense once I see nations as collections of big cities holding arbitrary (terrain may matter here) amount of "wastelands" between them. In general, no country would generate from those wastelands so it make sense that it's arbitrarily exchange between big cities surrounding them.
I don’t think it’s a promo but can’t be sure. I think the algo puts tweet threads that people you follow engage with (read the whole thing, like it, etc).
Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
When I went to Chile I was about to undertake a cross-country move across the US. Everybody I spoke to in Santiago couldn't imagine a country where you can drive a massive distance like that and move from one major metropolis to another. At the time, I thought they were just reflecting on the fact that Chile is a country where 40% of all people live in one metro area, so there isn't another huge metro area to move to.
Looking at those maps, I understand their incredulity. Because of the shape of Chile, you can drive a similar distance and basically cover the entire country, rural, urban, and suburban. It's both a large country and a small one at the same time.
City size is all definitional.
My first ever look at the states was out the window of a plane flying to NYC from the Bahamas at night. Straight up the east coast. Mind blowing. To my eyes it was one enormous city without any meaningful separation all the way. I was expecting to be surprised by the scale of the usa and yet it was way beyond what i could imagine.
Others won’t share that definition.
"BosWash" was the term E.F. Schumacher used for the east-coast conurbanation, in 1973. Boston-New York-Philadelphia-Baltimore-Washington. In Small is Beautiful: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Is_Beautiful>
It's sprawled more since.
Apparently the term was coined by Herman Kahn in 1967: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BosWash>
We're not that far off from Judge Dredd's Mega-City One!
beautiful image!
The Concepción metro area is 1 million people, Valparaíso/Viña as well. Chileans love to point out that there isn't much outside of Santiago but it's not really true.
Valparaíso and Viña are just next door from Santiago though.
There isn’t. Especially in the south. Floods, fires, and killer bears. It’s like The Purge, but every day. Don’t come.
> killer bears
I think this is where you gave it away. Nobody will believe this and we're all moving to south Chile now.
I would like to hear more about the killer bears, please
He is keeping the price of the land low for his next investment
While that might be true, Chile is a very centralized country, unfortunately.
I was talking to Santiaguinos, so I took it with a grain of salt.
is 1 million people a lot? I lived most of my life in metro areas of 15-30 million. when I finally ventured out and saw so many famous places at 1.5 million or less and how I could drive in and then back out of their downtowns in just a few blocks I was kind of shocked on how small most places are
There are only 26 areas in the world which are 15-30 million. They have about 550 million people, or about 7% of the world's population.
1 million is fairly large, especially in the context of Chile.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities
That list really undercounts many metro areas.
DC’s “Metropolitan area in 2020 was 6,385,162” it’s CSA was 9,546,579 in 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_metropolitan_area
That list puts it at 5.2 million people.
The 6M is included in the 9. They're not separate counts.
That CSA also includes Baltimore so not a vary fair example. Absolutely not the same metro.
I was mostly bringing up the 5.2 vs 6.4 both under Metro area.
The CSA isn’t necessarily relevant, but a reasonable agreement exists that it’s really the same metro area. The beltways (495, 695) are less than 25 miles apart. Laurel, Maryland is 20 miles from both downtown DC and downtown Baltimore. Meanwhile the other cities from Richmond to Boston are 95-200 miles from each other.
I knew someone whose tech support job would regularly send them to both cities in the same day. Apparently many companies located between them so they could easily serve both.
You can’t just look at distance and judge. I knew guys who lived north of Baltimore but commuted every day to the Pentagon. That doesn’t make Baltimore and DC two parts of the same city.
Just like there are people who commute from New York to London, or vice-versa. NyLon is a thing, but that still doesn’t make them two parts of the same city.
Same city is irrelevant, same metro area based on how people behave is what matters.
People commuting from downtown Baltimore to DC have a faster commute than many living in well recognized DC suburbs. That’s very different than NyLon.
Distance is irrelevant. I lived there. The cultures of DC and Baltimore are fundamentally different. Related, yes. But not the same.
They expanded the CSA to include Baltimore so as to reduce the average salary rate, and thus they didn’t have to pay for COLA wage increases.
From late 1989 to mid 1998, I lived in various parts of Northern Virginia and the Capitol region of Maryland, and made many trips to Baltimore. Totally not the same metro.
Having lived in Baltimore, it's juuust far enough from DC to not be a twin city.
Just out of curiosity, how far is far enough? As a thought experiment, would a shinkansen running every six minutes change this?
I think it's less about distance and more about culture. DC and Baltimore are vastly different in culture, recreational activities, industries, demographics, etc. People don't live downtown in one and work in the other. The commute would kill you. Average income in DC is nearly double what it is in Baltimore.
Like, imagine SF and Oakland, but with an extra 30 miles in between.
> SF and Oakland
I don't have a link but I remember reading an article/Blog post linked here on hn where a software developer was in San Francisco one evening, saw the cops arresting someone, went to say something, got arrested himself and they held him over a long weekend or something in terrible conditions, and the police officers said some terrible things like the person he arrested was overpaid and the officer had to live in Oakland or something.
I've never been to SF/Oakland but this is one of the first thing I think of when the place is mentioned. How is the employee to blame for structural/ societal issues. What kind of idiot dumps their frustration on just some passer by?
> DC and Baltimore are vastly different in culture, recreational activities, industries, demographics, etc. People don't live downtown in one and work in the other. The commute would kill you. Average income in DC is nearly double what it is in Baltimore.
Culture, recreational activities, demographics, etc. vary quite a bit in other "twin city" type situations as well. Dallas and Fort Worth are about as culturally different as you can get at that distance, and of course people don't live downtown in one and work in the other - people are making a very specific choice with very specific tradeoffs when it comes to living in a downtown area in general, and those don't make sense if you're not explicitly spending most of your time in that area. Income is about the only thing that doesn't hold true in the Texas and Minnesota examples listed elsewhere in the comments, and DC has some conditions fairly specific to it that cause that.
Instead of a shinkasen running every six minutes, we get a low-speed train that runs about once an hour, and only during working hours. If you work past 8 PM you're going to have to find another way home.
I don't really know what's far enough, but culturally they consider themselves entirely distinct. People from one almost never work in the other; the trains that do exist are for bringing people from the suburbs.
Even those suburbs are fairly distinct. There's a dividing line at Columbia, MD where people go both directions, and nearly everybody else affiliates themselves with one city or the other.
Another way to look at it: they have separate sports teams. They're not even rivals, because they play in different leagues. Within the city fans are pretty exclusive, and the other city's teams aren't of interest.
Maybe that would change if it were possible to live in one and work in the other, or if they commonly shared night-life or restaurants or leisure. Instead, the other city is a full-day trip, not a jaunt across town.
None of what’s in this comment or others reflects my experience at all. I work in DC and have had many colleagues who live in downtown Baltimore and Baltimore suburbs, even suburbs north of Baltimore. They have been Orioles fans. Some have driven, others take commuter rail. I live in a suburb that is closer to DC but the commuter pattern on the highway reflects traffic flow to the Baltimore area in the morning and away from it in the evening. My wife and I work in downtown DC and we live closer to DC than Baltimore, but we routinely attend cultural and recreational events in Baltimore and of course fly from the Baltimore airport. We had memberships in the National Aquarium (in Baltimore) and have taken our kids to the Maryland Zoo. They have never been to the National Zoo in DC.
Baltimore and DC are absolutely one metro, just like Dallas/Fort Worth and Minneapolis/Saint Paul. That two cities have distinct identities doesn’t mean they aren’t one metro.
Looking at that list there are probably 100s of "metro areas" with > 1m
Look at the UN 2019 population estimates and sort by it. The last 10 areas are
5.49m, 5.49m, 5.38m, 5.38, 5.30m, 5.21m, 5.16m, 5.09m, 5.05m, 5.02m
Given how curves like this usually go there's an extremely long tail to get to 1m
Concepcion has only ~200k people with <1m metro. Looking at a map of the city and with only 200k people it doesn't seem big
A fair point. This list has 468 above 1 million and I think that's the urban boundaries and not metro
I hadn't actually googled concepcion, 200,000 in the urban area is quite small. It would be interesting to somehow workout the percentile of population living in a larger/smaller place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_with_over_one_m...
In my book, 1M people is when a city starts to become a “proper” city. It’ll host major events, invest in public transit (beyond bus), have extensive infrastructure, have extremely thorough airport service, likely have many walkable neighborhoods, and generally feel like a city.
Under 1M and the city center tends to be very small with most people driving from the suburbs.
>Under 1M and the city center tends to be very small with most people driving from the suburbs.
That's a very US or modern Asian city view. In my corner of the world, the Rhine-Ruhr area and the Franco/German/Benelux region almost all cities are < 1 million but you'd be hard pressed to not call Ghent or Rotterdam[1] or Düsseldorf a proper city.
[1]https://t0.gstatic.com/licensed-image?q=tbn:ANd9GcR5dl_qfSco...
probably the median income of the area also goes into it, 1m with low median income might perform at about the same as 800,000 with high median income.
European cities - compared to U.S at least - also maybe have the factor of how long it has been a city to contribute to how much "a city" it seems.
Edinburgh, where I have lived/worked for 40 years and has a population of just over 500K has all of those and more: major arts festivals, good train and growing tram networks, good airport links, very walkable and certainly "feels" more like a city than a lot of much larger cities.
“This is a city of shifting light, of changing skies, of sudden vistas. A city so beautiful it breaks the heart again and again.”
the "City of Edinburgh" may be 500k people, but the metropolitan area is bigger - once you include the outlying towns which people commute from there's more like 800-900k people.
https://www.citypopulation.de/en/uk/agglo/S20000463A__edinbu...
The festivals also completely skew things. Edinburgh in February is a vastly different city than Edinburgh in August.
That's right - in February it's full of students ;-)
We're talking metro area, not city. If the city is 1M, it's metro area is likely 1.5 to 3 million. If the metro area is 1m then the city is probably 750k to 350k people.
The post above said "The Concepción metro area is 1 million people" which means the city itself is much smaller. In fact, Wikipedia says it's 200k people, 1m metro area
Just a quibble about the metro to city population ratio... I think it's usually a lot higher than 1.5 or 3 to 1. Portland where I live has a population of around 650k (city) and 2.6M (metro). So about 4:1. And it's one of the less spread out metro areas in the US. The LA metro has about 18.5M and the city itself about 4M. Chicago is also about 4:1. NYC is the exception at closer to 2.5:1.
Just having grown up in LA (the city), I think there's a cognitive bias in these places against recognizing just how freakin large they are when you live there. There are large corners of my home metro area I've never been to at all, whose people I would almost never interact with... and I say that as a former taxi driver! Of course, taxi driving in LA was always balkanized so you'd need separate licenses to pick up in this or that suburb... very Snow Crash-like even in the 90s.
...in America. In Eastern Europe, even 100k-200k city will have trams or trolleybuses, and will have most people living in condos near public transit, not in suburbs.
As someone who lives in a city with 1.5 million people... growing up I felt pretty underwhelmed by our downtown and you can indeed pass through it in a few blocks. The first time I went to Tokyo I felt like I was in a real city. But then again, it's one of the largest cities on earth, so of course it feels like a real city. Though cities like mine are far more common.
Jesus. What a post. 15-30 million? Where? There aren't that many on the planet.
Traveling around China, their sense of scale it pretty much 10x what America's is.
1 million is barely a city, around 5 million and you are a 2nd tier city, hit 8+ million and you are a "real city".
Meanwhile people in America are arguing that they are worried their "100k town is going to add 5000 people and become an urban hellscape!"
I visited a 8 million pop city. They had barely any foreign restaurants and my Chinese colleagues look down on me to have only visited a "small city".
China and India both have tons of places that meet that criteria.
I suspect Shenzhen for one
To all the downvotes, did you look at a map of Concepción?
It's small. It's 200k people. It's "metro area" (the 1m) is spread out.
"View of the World from Ruta 70"
[dead]
Concepcion, Valparaiso, Greater Temuco, La Serena/Coquimbo, Antofagasta are large urban zones.
You can learn more here https://elsemieni.net/megavision/
[Cerveza Cristal theme]
That's chile, Argentina is more similar to the US, however most people move from X => Buenos Aires.
That is a really nice bit of information communication. Hat's off! I feel like I learned a lot and that always makes me happy.
One quibble. At the end it mentions why Mexico's west was of interest to the Spanish, but neglects possibly the most important part - it was where the Spanish galleons from the Philippines first landed after the grueling trip across the Pacific as detailed beautifully in Neal Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle".
And the real history in 1493 by Charles C. Mann.
Samurai were documented as guards on galleons brought to Mexico. It needs to be a movie.
The novel called Taipan, by James Clavell, is quite interesting, IMO. He also wrote the novel Shogun, which I didn't enjoy as much.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tai-Pan_(novel)
Shogun is about Japan in the Samurai period and Taipan is about Hong Kong a few centuries ago.
Both novels are about those periods and about Westerners interacting with those countries at that time.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Clavell
[
Clavell wanted to write a second novel because "that separates the men from the boys".[21] The money from King Rat enabled him to spend two years researching and then writing what became Tai-Pan (1966). It was a huge best-seller, and Clavell sold the film rights for a sizeable amount (although the film would not be made until 1986).[22]
]
Interesting. I’ve had a pet research project that had a lot of anomalous cultural data points pointing into ancient Japanese pollination in places where many would be surprised by today’s “standard history.” It seems there’s deep connections across South America to Japan.
Is there any available information about this?
I was recently watching some YouTube videos about early contact between Europeans and Japanese. A lot of that was contact with Portugal, and from there they had contact with Spain and Italy, so they did go to Iberian colonies in the new world.
Look up Coria del Rio in Spain, too. A lot of people have the "Japón" surname. "Japón" it's Spanish for Japan.
Just under 2000 Spaniards have this surname, and to this day they primarily reside in Seville province, which was long the only allowed port of entry to peninsular Spain for imported goods from Spanish overseas territories.
https://ine.es/widgets/nombApell/index.shtml
If I recall there were also some Aztecs or Mayans brought to fight in Phillipines and SEA
i'm pretty sure there are aztecs and mayas who go to the philippines and southeast asia to fight today (to fight drug lords and the dictatorship of myanmar, respectively)
I'm also wondering if the Andes are steeper than the Rocky mountains? Some quick Googling suggests that might be the case but I'm not getting a definitive answer.
Gradual elevation is certainly easier to build roads across than a cliff, and might be another reason there's less east-west divide in North America.
I feel like I learned everything except the question in the title. I still don't know why it's long, just a lot of facts about how long it is.
Did you miss this early in the article? Or did you just not find it convincing?
> Chile is so long because of the Andes. Here's a map of elevation in South America.
> You can't easily pass these mountains, and the tiny sliver of land to their west is Chile.
Ok but why a single country ? Why hasn't it split?
TFA also covers that - desert in the north and rainforest in the south.
Basically, going east<->west is nearly impossible at scale, so moving an army is not going to happen if there is any resistance.
And going north<->south is so easy, that anyone doing it could likely cover the whole country pretty quick. So odds are, if there were two countries in that area, there would be just one pretty quickly.
Definitely one of those ‘geography defines the culture and the borders’ situations.
My key takeaway from this article is that the best place to go see the Milky Way is deep in the Amazon rainforest… where the tree cover is nearly 100% and there isn’t a single road for a hundred miles.
That’s a neat collection of graphics. I’m curious how bespoke the creation process is for each graphic or if this is something everyone just does in ArcGis or similar.
That last graphic about the Western US being the only other candidate is interesting because the two sides of the Rockies weren’t connected by a highway until the I70 over Glenwood Canyon was completed in 1992. Before its completion, the western and eastern halves of Colorado were practically different states and it took the interstate highway project half a century to get there because the terrain was so challenging.
Rather, go to Atacama, in Chile. It's a desert with pretty transparent air and little to no clouds, far from anywhere, and easier to traverse than a forest. It's also rather closer to the South pole, so not as hot as Amazon.
Agree with this. It’s the most beautiful night sky I’ve ever seen.
The stars seemed to shine 10x brighter than other places, even those without light pollution.
Apparently the desert in Kashmir (I think Ladakh specifically) is also excellent for astronomy for similar reasons - a dry desert, cool due to its altitude, and also benefits from thinner air causing lesser distortion.
There's a lot of big telescopes in north chile too
How’s the insect situation?
In the desert? It’s the driest place in the world
I've been to many places around the world from the Amazon rainforest to the Atacama Desert in Chile to right around Africa.
Without a shadow of a doubt, the interior of Australia is STAGGERINGLY the best for stargazing. It's not even close.
This was a single 8 second exposure. [1] and I'm not a great photographer. The milky way was so bright it kept me awake in my tent.
[1] https://www.instagram.com/p/CersLuLBfCz/
Can't see the pictures due to login required :-(
I've been on a dark ship in the middle of the ocean and that was pretty good for stargazing, though I guess Australia might be a tiny bit better due to less reflective surface (compared to the ocean)?
>Can't see the pictures due to login required :-(
Works for me (without login). I'm not sure why, it could be uBlock Origin or Privacy Badger maybe.
I'm running uBlock Origin, and don't care to disable it, oh well.
Well if you're running uBO and still need to login to see the picture, then uBO isn't helping avoid the login obviously. I'm running Chrome with uBO and Privacy Badger and a few other extensions, so you might want to try PB.
Australian here, spent my youth in the deep West.
I found your description inspiring.
I remember feeling, once, that night time was when everything in the universe could be seen, and daytime was when we slept in the shade of the sun, away from it all.
I grew up in rural Australia.
We had Japanese exchange students in High School, and the teachers stayed in our house (Mum & Dad were teachers). Even though I was only ~15, I have a very strong memory of the 50, 60 and 70 year old Japanese people staying outside until all hours stargazing.
They had never seen stars before.
[dead]
The most amazing sky I’ve ever seen was when I arrived in Urubichá in Guarayos region of Bolivia in 1998 before the electricity arrived in the area. I traveled by bus to visit my friend’s childhood home. The bus only went to the big city an hour away so I road in the back of a jeep the rest of the way, at night. I remember vividly not understanding what this super-bright light was in the sky. I know now it was either Venus or Jupiter, but it looked artificial because it was so much brighter than I was used to seeing.
Venus always appears near the sun (hence the "morning star" moniker).
If it's near the sun you cannot see it in the middle of the night (except in polar areas during summer). But why only morning and not evening?
Mornings and evenings.
It is because its path is closer to the Sun. So when looking towards it you are always partly looking towards the Sun.
So you are saying the morning star name is technically wrong? It should be the morning and evening star? Of course star is wrong, too...
Venus is known as either the ‘morning star’ or ‘evening star’ depending on where Venus is in its orbit relative to Earth.
It actually just recently (start of June) went behind the sun; it’s still too close to the sun in the sky to really be visible at all at the moment. As it moves further out from behind the sun it will start being visible in the evening sky in late July right after the sun sets, so it will be the ‘evening star’ again for the next eight months or so before it passes in front of the sun, disappearing from view for a bit, then comes back as the morning star next summer.
You'd prefer the more accurate and historic Wandering Star?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_planet
> the two sides of the Rockies weren’t connected by a highway until the I70 over Glenwood Canyon was completed in 1992.
US 40, 6, and 50 would like a word.
They weren't connected by an interstate before that. But you said "highway". US 6 was a highway, and it ran through the exact same Glenwood Canyon.
Fair point about the exact terminology but those are tiny two lane roads with impassable grades for the majority of commercial traffic. The term highway has drifted in colloquial use (hence your use of the word “was”).
Yes, they were two lane roads. But no, they did not have impassable grades. Neither Loveland nor Berthoud Pass were easy, especially in winter, but they did in fact carry lots of commercial traffic (though I would think twice about sending an oversized load over them). In fact, to this day the old two-lane road of US 6 over Loveland Pass is used to keep hazardous material out of the I-70 tunnels.
I mean, I remember around 1968-69, before they finished building Interstate 80 up Echo Canyon, and that tiny two-lane road had to take all the commercial traffic that there was on "the main street of North America".
> The term highway has drifted in colloquial use
No it hasn't. "Highway" encompasses a lot of levels of road. If you're referring to an interstate, say so. That's the only thing that actually means that, and only that.
> My key takeaway from this article is that the best place to go see the Milky Way is deep in the Amazon rainforest… where the tree cover is nearly 100% and there isn’t a single road for a hundred miles.
Check out Cherry Springs State Park in Pennsylvania: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_Springs_State_Park
Pine Mountain Observatory, if you're on the West coast, has some of the darkest skies, best weather and stable atmosphere for good seeing. 24 inch telescope, too.
https://pmo.uoregon.edu/
You can see a brighter part of the Milky Way in the Southern hemisphere than you can in the Northern hemisphere.
It rains almost everyday, mostly in the late evening and night. My guess is clouds would be your main concern, not light pollution.
The problem with your takeaway is that you a) won't be able to realistically get deep into the amazon rainforest and b) the tree canopy would cover all of the sky ;)
Yep. It's way easier to take a boat to the middle of the ocean - fewer roads than even in the amazon :) and the best starry sky of my life
This is a dream of mine, to soend the night far away from land that there's nothing around but water.
Did you already have sea experience, or did you just rent a boat and gave it a try?
>> just rent a boat and gave it a try?
As someone who once worked tangentially in search and rescue, please do not even consider this. The ocean is a serious thing, doubly so at night. Unless you are renting a boat large enough to come with its own staff, please do not just head over the horizon simply to see the stars. And fyi, the stars at sea move as the boat you stand on moves. They are brighter, but also more blurry.
Someone who has no experience in a boat, who is also on a boat they are unfamiliar with, is probably also not that familiar with navigation.
And over the horizon can easily be outside of cell phone range. And is definitely outside of visual range.
So it seems prudent to do a ‘don’t get yourself killed, seriously.’ Warning eh?
5km out to sea is far more dangerous than you think. For starters, you're 5km away from help. The water is deeper, and the currents and wind stronger.
Would a simple cruise ship ticket do it? Or be too lit up at night?
Cruise ships dont have dark decks or other places to view the ocean directly at night. It would be like standing on your porch with the exterior lights of ypur house left on.
Avoiding light pollution is not really about seeing stars through light pollution. Thats for astronomers with telescopes. For human eyes it is more about being dark enough thay your iris can relax and let in more light. Try a dark forest, even a city park, surrounded by trees but able to see up. You will see more stars even if inside an urban area.
Also an area that is dark enough for ‘far enough’ that your eyes will naturally adjust to pick up these faint light sources. While some adjustment happens even in a few minutes, the difference between that and after several hours of darkness is mind blowing.
Most folks in a city likely have never been able to experience being able to walk by true starlight on a moonless night, and seeing clearly. It would be nearly impossible to get the right conditions even with a lot of effort.
A city park may be okay ish, but you’re unlikely to ever get the level of sight you’d get walking on a deserted playa in the desert. Not enough time with true darkness, and too much other light pollution.
Just drive an hour away from your nearest city, to the "rural" parts of your state. That's all you need to see a gorgeous night sky. You will see a beautiful sky even just a mile or so outside of a small town of 10k people.
Nothing but Cthulhu's dreams under you :')
Also, there's likely to be cloud cover and mist, etc. Rainforest!
They make a map for this: https://www.darkskymap.com/nightSkyBrightness
For the North American peeps, check out the western part of the US.
*edit: and forecasts https://www.cleardarksky.com/csk/
The astrophotography communities I am a member of tend to use the Bortle scale map at https://www.lightpollutionmap.info/
This one is more mobile-friendly, IMO.
I think the graphics have numerous sources and mostly/entirely aren't made by the post author. There are five different styles in the first six map images!
You should have very dry air for the best place, which I guess with all that Amazon rainforest thing, would not be your best option. Chile has the one of the driest deserts in the world.
Just come to NZ, go to the Dark Sky Reserve centered around Lake Tekapo and enjoy the Milky Way in all its glory.
We have zero snakes and very few dangerous spiders and you'd have to try very hard to find them, they're rather shy.
Also, we make great coffee and beer.
NZ sounds heavenly.
Not really, that would probably be the north of Chile on the Atacama desert, there's a reason why the Extremely Large Telescope, Giant Magellan Telescope and Vera C. Rubin are being built there.
Can confirm, was there in 2001. The clarity of the air owing to lack of moisture and no light pollution means you get amazing views of the milky way.
Watching this footage of the Very Large Telescope in Chile was the first time I really grasped that we're all together on a rock tumbling through the vastness of space: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFpeM3fxJoQ
i'm going to assume that commoners like us don't have access to that telescope.
It wouldn't give you the bombastic views you are used to from press realeases.
Those are all longer exposure, at different wavelengths, stitched together digitally.
With your bare eye in the focal point of that thing you'd just see Jupiter and some of its moons, the Rings of Saturn, some extrasolar nebulae and some galaxies better than with common amateur telesecopes. Otherwise just more and brighter stars, with some more hints of color.
You'd have more immersion by using binoculars with a wide field of view, and low magnification, like 10 to 20, maybe 30 times. But the latter with a wide field of view are rather heavy, so bring a foldable camping chair to lie down on, and some contraption to have the binoc hanging down on you, easily movable, but not shaky. Or a tripod, but they are impractical for looking straight up. (with common binocular eye-pieces)
Pretty sure you can rent telescope time it's just booked so you might have to wait.
You can still go physically, there's tours and such. But it doesn't make sense for a physicist to go there when all the imagery is captured by a computer anyway.
Also, if you've been to those altitudes you know it's not a walk in the park either!
There are plenty of remote telescope services you can make use of. The one at http://telescope.live/ is probably one of the best known in the astrophotography communities I am a member of, but there are many others.
I love these maps, it’s an awesome collection! I make data vis maps for my day job and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that each of these are completely bespoke, made by different people, using a unique technique - python, hand drawing, ArcGIS, Blender, and even R can be used to make these, and I usually use deck.gl
They’re fun to make combining design, data, graphics programming, and lots of fiddling to get the tools to do what you want!
The sky from the top of Mauna Kea is ridiculous, and it's pretty easy to get there: fly to the big island of Hawaii, then sign up for the tour, I think it's less than $100. The milky way is stunning.
Just check the lunar phase before you book. Made the mistake of being in Hawaii during the full moon, so we didn’t get much of a view of the stars on our Mauna Kea trip. Don’t get me wrong - the experience of visiting to the top and watching the telescopes opening up was worth the trip, but we missed out on a real stargazing opportunity.
And we did see a fireball meteor, so that kinda made up for it. But I don’t think those are guaranteed.
My nomination for night sky viewing: Ölgii in western Mongolia (was there for the golden eagle festival). Clear desert sky, accessible by airplane, not a tiny town either.
I've lived on both the eastern and western slopes of Colorado. They are still practically two different states culturally and economically.
Several of the maps were made by Twitter users @researchremora and @cstats1, using R and the rayshader package.
It's a fantastic drive if you've never done it
How is the table of dialects constructed? It's obvious if two dialects are at 1, but what does it mean if they're at 0? They can't be mutually unintelligible, since that would make them different languages. I ask because the dialects spoken in Argentina and in Uruguay are practically identical, save for a few regional words. If the scale being used puts them at 0.35, then it makes me wonder about the usefulness of the scale.
Dialects can mean very different things hence the old joke "a language is a dialect with its own army and navy", recognizing that the issue is really political rather than linguistic. Many Chinese dialects (like Mandarin and Cantonese) are considered dialects of the same "Chinese language" for political reasons but are mutually unintelligible, whereas Danish and Norwegian (the majority bokmal dialect anyway) are considered different languages even though they are pretty mutually intelligible because Norway and Denmark are different countries.
As for how the table of Spanish dialects was constructed, the figure gives the link to the paper it was from [1]. Basically they measured differences in dialects by giving pictures of an item (the example shown is a pinwheel) and asking what Spanish speakers from different places called that thing. Given hundreds of different concepts you can see how close Spanish dialects are to each other.
[1] https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/opli-2018-003...
You don't even have to go all the way to China. The English countryside has multiple so called "accents" that are basically unintelligible to a speaker of London English, with plenty of famous examples in popular media (e.g. [1][2]).
Similarly, Germany has plenty of mutually unintelligible dialects. They are all related to each other and any two geographically adjacent dialects are mutually intelligible, but as distance grows it becomes harder to bridge the gap (which is why everyone learns Standard German nowadays). Luxembourgish meanwhile is in every sense a dialect of German with French influences, but due to having an army is considered its own language.
1: https://youtu.be/Hs-rgvkRfwc
2: https://youtu.be/Z660sool2L4?t=49
Okay, so the article is wrong for using that bit of data for the argument. It doesn't tell you much about how well two people from two different places will understand each other. If two people are in the same place and one says to the other "¿me das la veleta?", but the other would have called the object "molinete", chances are they could probably understand what the other person is saying. What makes different dialects of Spanish difficult to understand each other is slang and accent, not different words for common objects. Like, if a Spaniard tells me "Mariana está en el ordenador", I'm not going to get confused about what he means even if I would have called it "computadora".
True, but that's like saying a British person wouldn't be confused by the phrase "the trunk of my car" said by an American even if they would would say "the boot of my car" themselves. The fact still remains than "trunk" is US dialect and "boot" is British, and that the dialects are different.
I'm not saying the dialects are not different, I'm saying the fact that they're different is separate from how mutually unintelligible they are. Correlated? Yeah, sure. Equivalent? Not even close.
Shouldn't that comparison be weighted by how frequent the words are? For example words in the top 100 usage would count for more than the top 1000 and the top 10000.
It would be a much different story if British English and American English had different words for "a car". Which, by the way, happens in Spanish dialects ("el coche" vs "el carro").
In Chile:
* auto: car
* coche: stroller or carriage (depending on context)
* carro: cart or carriage (see above)
here (argentina, non-native) we usually say 'el auto' but have significant use of 'coche'. 'carro' means something different; using it for an automobile sounds mexican
but if you showed an argentine a picture of a car, they might very well say 'auto' while perhaps someone from elsewhere would say 'coche', leading to a basically incorrect point of difference being measured in this study between the two dialects
Why would it be incorrect? Sometimes two or three different words describe the same thing and that's ok. If you poll enough people you can get a rough idea if one version is more dominant that the other, if there's an even split, or if different regions in the same country prefer different versions. Similar to soda/pop/coke in the US.
You can design a study with a high level of data granularity. You could even track differences in pronunciation and grammar if you wish so.
because 'we usually say coche but sometimes say auto' is almost the same as 'we usually say auto but sometimes say coche', but they differ from 'we always say carro'. if a study is saying spanish is radically different in montevideo and in buenos aires, it's just wrong. this may not be the particular design error that resulted in these incorrect results, but it seems like a promising candidate
I think we're both in agreement. Perhaps my example of coche/carro was unfortunate and I didn't make my point clear enough.
A well-designed study, in my mind, would compare the usage of a varied bag of words. Starting from articles, pronouns, numbers, common verbs, then common objects, verb forms, less common adjectives, ending with uncommon objects and phrases. The compared words would be weighted based on their frequency. If two dialects have the same articles, pronouns, numbers, etc. and some differences in less frequent nouns, they would be similar rather than radically different - at least lexically. Things might look differently if we look at pronunciation.
I don't know what list of words was compared in the study linked in this subthread, so it's hard for me to say anything about it.
i agree
Spain:
Automóvil: Formal word for car.
Coche: Car. If used with 'de caballos' (of horses), well, carriage.
Carro: Carriage, or trolley.
And I suspect this is only true because of frequent cultural contact. If there wasn't any the British wouldn't know the American English word for it.
I guess thank God for Hollywood, it means we can all at least speak one version of English
probably a better cross-atlantic example would be something like 'perambulator' where the other dialect doesn't have a conflicting meaning for the word
I agree with you, differences in pronunciation, cadence, etc. should be taken in account as well. Though measuring those could take longer, if possible.
Danes and legibility isn't something people say often, even Danes themselves can't always understand other Danes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk
> but what does it mean if they're at 0? They can't be mutually unintelligible, since that would make them different languages.
I think it might actually mean unintelligible. If you read on the term "dialect" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect it says in part:
> There is no universally accepted criterion for distinguishing two different languages from two dialects (i.e. varieties) of the same language.
The difference between language is more culturally and politically defined than linguistically; there are different langauges spoken in the world that have a fiar overlap and elligibility, and there are different dialects of the same "language" that are basically untelligable. It might be sensible to just consider all spoken systems to be "dialects" of each other, and comparing their similarity.
Not a linguist though.
I agree. Argentine and Uruguayan Spanish are very close. I'd expect to have seen .85 or so. Argentine and Chilean Spanish are not that far apart either -- or at least they weren't 30 years ago.
I have no idea. Also there is no standard spanish even in Spain. Like Andalucian spanish and Domenican spanish have a lot in common but vary greatly with other forms of spanish.
When I was getting my degree, two of my classmates spoke Spanish as a first language. One was a transfer student from Madrid, and the other was an immigrant from northern Mexico. I was in the room the first time they met and tried speaking Spanish to one another. They couldn't understand each other and communicated solely in English after about 10 minutes.
The funny thing is that both Spaniards and Mexicans claim to use the most neutral spanish, but you'd find their idiosyncrasies rather quickly - spaniards' 'f' sound of the letter S, and the infinite modisms and particular mexican accent on the other hand.
As the Spanish empire extended its spread so widely the language grew pretty complex (as english did!) so not even the most "neutral" spanish speaking countries do it as the RAE intends.
On the other hand, Chileans really do speak their very own language.
> Chileans really do speak their very own language
Only informally. Formal Chilean Spanish is probably one of the most understandable ones, accent-wise. (There's still some vocabulary differences)
This idea is somewhat prevalent among native Chilean speakers, but I respectfully disagree. Even under formal settings, many of the features of colloquial Chilean variants are present, and often an additional effort to neutralize the accent needs to be made to sound “formal enough” to other Spanish speakers.
One thing is that pretty much the only place you'll see formal chilean is in like, the news, or official government communication. We're not very formal people, so even in workplaces or school we wouldn't use 100% formal register.
Sure, that is largely true. But, to state that the formal register of Chilean Spanish is “probably one of the most understandable ones, accent-wise” of all available Spanish registers is, in my humble opinion, quite a stretch.
I don't know, here's a random news segment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfvrmrYG_-c
But I think chileans are ok with people saying we don't speak well, so it doesn't matter too much.
Goddamn, is that what professional news outlets sound like? It sounds like a YouTuber trying as hard as possible to sound cool or edgy. Dude, leave the coke for after the broadcast.
> here's a random news segment
Where the announcer is actually overpronouncing while still keeping (expectedly) some elision. In your example, Boric’s formal register is closer to what one would usually listen.
> chileans are ok with people saying we don't speak well
I never claimed that, I am merely addressing your “one of the most understandable” statement.
That's a very anecdotal experience.
I met my ex-wife in Madrid where I lived for 4 years and where she was from. That's where I learned Spanish as a second language. After we moved back to California, we obviously met and spoke to many Mexicans over the years. Zero problems communicating for her, ever. Spanish is still Spanish.
If not utterly false and defaming. ANY educated Spanish speaker could talk to any other one from the whole Latin America in the spot. We are not talking about hicks with a deep and harsh accent such as some Andalusian farmer and some Northern Mexican paisano from Nowhereland. (Kinda like mixing an Appalachian and a Scottish).
Spaniard here. I daily talk with Argentines. Maybe the grammar and slang get obtuse sometimes, but overall once we talk formal Spanish the issues on jargon dissappear.
Also, the Spanish Royal Academy for the language logs every word from Iberia to Mexico and the Patagonia at their online dictionary, so everyone can guess the meaning of a local word in the spot.
I call bullshit on this. I am from Spain, I have met many people from different Spanish-speaking countries including Equatorial Guinea (people always forget about them), and we rarely have any problem understanding anybody (unless someone is an idiot who doesn't want to be understood, it happens too).
This is just anecdata regarding two people I knew personally. As with everything, reality may be quite different in the aggregate and individual experiences will vary.
There literally is a standard Spanish, no? I understand it to be based on Castilian. However I understand your point that even within the country of Spain there are many dialects which diverge from "standard".
> There literally is a standard Spanish, no?
Not really. Just like English, the standard variety in each country is considered equally "standard".
> I understand it to be based on Castilian.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. As far as I know Castilian is just a synonym for the Spanish language (as opposed to other languages of Spain e.g. Catalan). So the variety spoken in Guatemala and the one in Tenerife are equally "Castilian".
No, it's not like English. There is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Spanish. It is maintained by the: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Spanish_Academy. In practice, I'm not sure what the impact is. I'm not a native Spanish speaker. But Spanish is not like English in regard to prescriptive norms.
Spanish native here, confirming that RSA is the institution that sets the language standard.
But, people always deviate from it, though in my experience in word meanings and pronunciation, never in grammar to a degree that it become intelligible to another Spanish speaker.
The toughest film to listen to for me was "The rose seller"[1] (1998), took me like 10m to get my ear accustomed to their pronunciation.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASrxQCuVT-U
The paisa accent is very hard, even for us non-paisa colombians - not only for its colloquialisms but for its cadence.
So is the Andalusian accent from a Northern Spaniard like me, it's close to the prosody and speech of the US Southern accent. The first 20 minutes understanding Risitas were pure hell. But you get used to it in a few days. It's like some American trying to understand the Scott/Welsh (can't remember now) sheperd not exposed to it. I'm pretty sure they could be used to it in less time than a week.
To my non-roman ear it sounds a little like Italian.
There's "neutral" spanish, but it's less of a formal standard and more of a rough subset that people recongnize it's generally understandable to most people
It being so artificial means that it doesn't fit anywhere, even it if's becoming more common (Kids are growing up listening to Media dubbed to it, so it's not weird seing a Child "speak like a cartoon" for a while until their local dialect kicks in)
It is what I usually call the "TV" or "media" standard. Same in french, the french language you listen on TV is very uncommon if you actually talk to french people from different areas of France and it is not even common in Paris.
The differences between Spanish "dialects" are overstated IMO and closer to accents. No two Spanish accents are as different as the dialects of Arabic or dialects of Chinese are from each other. People will share anecdotes about not being able to understand different words(like straw, car, computer) but the underlying grammar is the same in all varieties. Im natively fluent in both English(US) and Spanish and I find English accents way harder to understand than Spanish ones. The only time Ive felt completely clueless listening to English was talking to a Scottish man.
The royal Academy of Spanish has the mission of promoting language unity, the American vocabulary is huge so a lot of words are really puzzling for people in other countries, but there is a common root that can be used.
Yeah, I was wondering about these two countries myself. Also it was very strange to see the Peru and Cuba correlation, those two dialects are nothing alike.
yeah, literally the only difference i can think of is 'contigo' (which is 'con vos' in argentina)
People from both countries can speak a version of Spanish that is mutually intelligible. But if you go into a high school (or even listen to adults that are being very casual) then it'd sound wildly different.
I speak Chilean Spanish. Distinctive characteristics include no use of vos; the "tú" conjugation is often "-ai" (cómo estai?) or "-i" (qué teni allí?); saying weón every sentence; using "po" for emphasis (sí po!); specific words like "fome" (boring), "la raja" (awesome), "bacán" (cool); phrases like "estoy cagado de hambre", "estoy chato", "pasarlo chancho", "cachai?"...
It's also very related to class, at least in Chile. Even I struggle to understand people in tougher neighborhoods of Santiago.
sorry, i was talking about the differences between buenos aires spanish and uruguay spanish. i totally cacho that chilean is a different language entirely, however much germán garmendia tries to pretend otherwise :)
Ohhh. That makes way more sense. I was surprised “contigo” was only difference that came to mind haha
Q: How many meanings does "weón" have?
A: Yes
Wow, it's wonderful to see my country mentioned here! And the article has a lot of content I didn't know about, too.
The article mentions it, but I only learned recently that Bolivia did not used to be landlocked. Chile took Bolivia's coastline somewhat recently (late 1800s/early 1900s).
> The dispute began in 1879, when Chile invaded the Antofagasta port city on its northern border with Bolivia as part of a dispute over taxes. Within four years Chileans had redrawn the map of South America by taking almost 50,000 square miles of Bolivian territory, including its 250-mile coastline on the southern Pacific Ocean. Bolivia accepted this loss in 1904, when it signed a peace treaty with Chile in return for a promise of the “fullest and freest” commercial access to port.
https://time.com/5413887/bolivia-chile-pacific/
Disclaimer: I live in Chile, but not a Chilean national(nor of similar ethnicity), and certainly not a historian.
The dispute is seen differently in Chile and is not as simplistic as Chile invading a port. In general i've gotten the sense that the general populace believes that Bolivia(with its secret alliance with Peru) had other intentions.
>In February 1878, Bolivia increased taxes on the Chilean mining company Compañía de Salitres y Ferrocarril de Antofagasta [es] (CSFA), in violation of the Boundary Treaty of 1874 which established the border between both countries and prohibited tax increases for mining. Chile protested the violation of the treaty and requested international arbitration, but the Bolivian government, presided by Hilarión Daza, considered this an internal issue subject to the jurisdiction of the Bolivian courts. Chile insisted that the breach of the treaty would mean that the territorial borders denoted in it were no longer settled.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Pacific
>Ill-defined borders and oppressive measures allegedly taken against the Chilean migrant population in these territories furnished Chile with a pretext for invasion.
https://www.britannica.com/place/Chile/The-War-of-the-Pacifi...
Chilenos weones
Yup, this is what happens. All the time.
confirmo, soy chileno
Chile could have been even longer, during the war the Chilean army took Lima.
Yeah, you are missing the backstory for that, which another commenter mentioned. Bolivia violated a treaty they had with Chile, and also had a secret alliance with Peru. They violated the treaty so they would go to war with Chile, and then team with Peru and try to conquer Chile. However, Chile had a very recently professionalized army and navy trained by the Germans, whereas Bolivia and Peru had peasants conscripted. (To this day the Chilean armed forces are amongst the most trained in the world.)
The result? Bolivia lost all of its coastline, and Peru also lost its southern territories.
You can summarize the war as in Bolivia and Peru fcked around, and then found out.
If you go to the Bolivian part of Lake Titicaca (home of the Bolivian navy), there is a statue with a sword pointing West saying something along the lines of "We are going to take back what is ours".
Yeah everyone in Chile, Bolivia & Peru will argue about this all day long.
One of the most interesting drives in my life was Chile from the island of Chiloe to the Tatio Geysers in the Atacama. Just so many different climate zones, and all in relatively close proximity.
Chiloe and Puerto Montt were damp, cold, and fog-shrouded in Summer (Jan-Feb), very similar to parts of the coastal pacific northwest.
The area to its north, centered around the German-influenced town of Valdivia, was California-like. Very temperate in Summer, and very green. Lots of pastures and rivers.
The region becomes progressively more "Mediterranean" as you move further north; one gradually sees fewer pastures and woodlands, more vineyards, olive trees, and fruit orchards. Santiago is on the far northern end of this Mediterranean zone. The great wine regions are generally to the south and west of that capital city.
A few hours north of Santiago and all is desert -- but it's a fairly live desert, with all sorts of succulent plants and many types of flower. Most of the road traffic in these parts comes from copper miners and their work trucks.
Continue north and you're in a dry, mostly empty, moonscape. Antofagasta and Calama are nice enough towns, though, and the interesting drive from the former to the latter takes just two hours but sees you rise from sea level to +2000m. It's such a gentle and relentless slope that you barely notice it. Nothing at all like driving in the Alps.
I broke something in my rental car when I continued to the geysers at +4000m, but it was worth it.
> Just so many different climate zones, and all in relatively close proximity.
Another place like this, perhaps lesser in scale, is the Big Island of Hawaii. Its latitude means the trade winds are blowing from the same direction year-round, bringing moisture to the windward side (e.g. Hilo, HI with 120" average annual rainfall) and leaving the leeward side dry (e.g. Kailua-Kona, HI with under 20" average annual rainfall), on the other side of massive volcanoes. And you can go from the ocean to almost 14k feet in elevation in an hour's drive; this may be one of the only places in the world where you can do that.
All of this means that as you move around Big Island, based on the precipitation, humidity, and elevation, you're going to see wildly different environments mere minutes' drive from each other. It truly has to be seen to be believed.
I was recently in the big island and this was both unexpected and wild to me. The difference of a couple miles could have an enormous impact on the weather over time. We stayed a couple of days in Volcano Village and like clockwork it'd be rainy there but sunny or at least partly sunny just a few miles down the street. Then there are rain forests, cloud forests, deserts, and every thing in between.
Hawaii was never on my list of places to visit until now, but now I have to go there. Thanks for sharing
It's expensive, and it's a long way away from anything else.
I've been twice and both times the Big Island was my favorite. Maui and Kauai are spectacular in their own ways, as are the few rural areas of Oahu, but there's nothing like the Big Island. The drive from Kailua-Kona to Hilo over the Saddle Road (which, in itself, goes to around 6600 ft) is spectacular, and if you have enough time to make a day of it, coming back around via the southern ring road is well worth it. If you get up early, Waimea and the surrounding area (esp the NW protuberance of land) are worth seeing as well. Huge variation in biomes in very short distances.
Probably I’d go there for a few weeks. I’ll make it my first stop to the US(if they let me in).
Tenerife is a bit like that. 12k feet at the top.
Yes, Tenerife is awesome, a different biome almost every few kilometers. I've been there hiking several times, and I always see something new!
And to a lesser extent, Gomera.
Just by the sea, beaches and small banana plantations. Go slightly inland and up the hills, you're in an arid region. Continue slightly further up, and you get into a lush, verdant forest. All within maybe 20 minutes' drive.
Best part? There's no airport on the island - you have to fly to Tenerife and take a ferry.
To this day, the best tomatoes I've ever had.
And yet another place like this is in Southern California if you drive in an easterly direction starting on San Diego and ending in the Salton Sea, going through Ramona and Julien. You go from an area with a Mediterranean climate to temperate deciduous forests to coniferous forests to cold, high-elevation desert to hot, low-elevation desert (Anza Borrego Desert). This is all within about 50 miles (80km). It's a fascinating drive!
>so many different climate zones, and all in relatively close proximity
Yes. Just mountain climbing in northern Patagonia (between Bariloche & Villarica, really only 100mi of north-south distance) became my favorite part of the world for your reason. In a single day (or two), we could walk in the dry, dusty bottom of a canyon dug out by glacier melt, cross through a humid jungle, rest on the shores of an alpine lake, pick your way across a massive rocky field of a'a lava, up a glacier and look down inside the caldera of an active volcano.
The only other place I have been that come close to having that amount of diversity of terrain in a limited area might be the Tetons/Yellowstone.
It's only partly in Chile, but regardless all of the scenery in A Long Way Up is breathtaking:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Way_Up
Torres del Paine in the south is pretty brutal to get to if you're not used to long flight but it is breathtaking. Definitely a bucket list trip if you enjoy nature and wildlife, hiking, etc.
It's nice, but unfortunately listed on nearly every tour guide of Chile, so these days it's flooded with tourists most of the time. You'll have a much better time seeing other places slightly off the beaten track.
During the summer months yeah, but I've been there last year during the end season and, although there are still lots of tourists, it's not overwhelming and some of the hikes were pretty chill.
Going straight to the Torres themselves will usually be crowded (depending on the time of the day). But some of the other hikes less so. I've done the W Circuit (a multi-day trek) and during some days I barely saw another hiker.
I hate visiting touristy cities but I mind don't mind it as much in nature areas. Mainly because the nature isn't changing itself for the tourists.
I visited Torres de Paine and it was refreshingly different from national parks in the US. On the upside, you can get water and basic snacks at the refugios which reduce the load you have to carry, and makes for an overall safer experience than unsupported wilderness backpacking but still with minimal impact on nature. On the other hand I did not like that they close a lot of viewpoints long before sunset.
"Mainly because the nature isn't changing itself for the tourists."
Yes, but some tourists change the nature by leaving their garbage etc.
Or by burning it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torres_del_Paine_National_Park...
That sounds bad, but in the end:
"Nevertheless, recent paleoenvironmental studies performed within the Park indicate that fires have been frequent phenomena at least during the last 12,800 years."
So fires are a normal thing there, or they have tourists since 12,800 years ..
Or blasting their music from a phone or Bluetooth speaker.
Yeah I hate that, but at first glance it didn't seem to be a huge problem in TdP compared to most other national parks around the world I have been to. Most people I encountered seemed quite responsible. Chile is overall a very well-educated country though, and TdP takes significant effort to get to compared to so it is perhaps a natural filter.
Really enjoyed that. The views are surreal. Got lucky with the weather too.
It’s roughly the equivalent of British Columbia to Mazatlan, except the water is a tiny bit cooler. Santiago is the same latitude as LA, for example.
I love Chiloe and Los Lagos region. I would buy a “southern summer” house there if I didn’t have kids in school.
Vancouver when the cherry blossoms are in bloom is interesting, the different elevations and the different progress of the trees is fun to pay attention to.
I travelled to Chile earlier this year and visited Atacama and Torres de Paine.
The thing that boggled my mind was that you can't drive between the two without a very long detour through Argentina. Chile has literally no road linking the northern part with the southernmost part without going outside the country.
It is also mind boggling that rail is not more popular there. A long, slim country is ideal for high speed rail.
Actually you can cross the entirety of Chile by car if you don't mind taking a ferry that starts in Puerto Montt and arrives in Puerto Natales. It is 4 day trip, but the scenery is gorgeous. Regarding the rail system, Chile had a great rail system that went from Arica to Puerto Montt with lots of spurs going into inner towns. However it was slowly dismantled and now most of the rails are in disuse, or used for the transport of goods. There is still a main rail for passenger transport, but most people prefers taking the bus or driving because of convenience.
> It is also mind boggling that rail is not more popular there. A long, slim country is ideal for high speed rail.
See one of my other comments in this post regarding the rail in Chile.
Looking at the map of southern Chile, it's pretty obvious why this is so. It's just immense mountains and fjords. Building a road across that terrain would be a major challenge, requiring many bridges capable of surviving harsh conditions. All to deserve a minuscule population? Chile isn't Norway...
Latitude-wise, Torres de Paine is comparable to northern Belgium than it is to Norway. Even Ushoaia, the southernmost major city in Americas, looks more like Belfast in the UK, or Gdansk in Poland, which are both into way more nicer climates than Norway. I just think that having some infrastructure in place, linking the southern parts of Chile with the rest, may be exactly what is needed for addressing the stounted growth there.
Europe in unusually warmer than anywhere on its latitude, mostly because of gulf stream. So Norway (and Canada) comparison should be appropriate.
I tried to cross the border into Argentina north of Puerto Montt. I wanted to check out the Argentinian side for a day or two. But they wouldn't let me across the border with my rental car, and I got turned back. I suppose the rules are a little bit different in the far south?
If you want to bring a Chilean rental car into Argentina you need to obtain and pay for a specific permit at least a few days before you pick up the rental car. Maybe that was missing? When I crossed the border they were very thorough with checking this permit.
> If you want to bring a Chilean rental car into Argentina you need to obtain and pay for a specific permit at least a few days before you pick up the rental car.
Classic Argentinian bureaucracy, making the country lose money since time immemorial
Afuera!
Actually it is because you need car insurance for accidents against third parties. This must be bought before going over the border. Usually there are shops in border towns that can help you with the paperwork.
The bus system is very cheap though, it’s very hard to compete with that
>It is also mind boggling that rail is not more popular there
That would require the upper class to mix with the poor. Not acceptable in Chile.
Barely, different classes of carriage?
I don't know anything about the history of trains or carriages, but in the heyday of railway development in Britain (iron rails, steam locomotive, etc.) it would have been far less acceptable than today too. And still all trains I'm aware of/have been on have two classes of carriage. Indian trains have several, and similar cultural need for that I imagine (I don't really know anything about Chile).
I’m told that prior to industrialization there were areas along the Andes (in Peru for sure, presumably Chile as well) where you rarely if ever met the tribes living uphill or downhill from you. It was way easier to travel north and south.
Quite the contrary, the management of the different ecological floors was the specialty of the inhabitants of the Andes, even now. The same community owns and uses land at different altitudes, which can range from 1000 to 4000 meters above sea level. This generated an economy based on the exchange of goods along vertical lines.
https://haubooks.org/reciprocity-and-redistribution/
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/24/obituaries/24murra.html
Might have been an urban legend or someone confusing their locations.
There was a very similar model in California as well. Seasonal migration from the sea to the hills and back. Given the supposed patterns of settlement of the Americas maybe this is not particularly surprising.
The Atacama Desert is exceptional, the absolutely best solar energy resource on the planet.
Best place to build lithium batteries _and_ charge them!
Is there a name for this simple style of writing?
It reminds me of the style of pop science books written in the late 19th and early 20th century. There's a nice charm in it, like it's trying not to be pretentiously complex.
This author wrote a number of pretty influential essays during the early pandemic advocating for mask use, social distancing, and other mitigations. He's a trained educator, so the effectiveness of communication is definitely no accident:
https://fortune.com/2020/08/10/the-overnight-coronavirus-exp...
My gf is a trained educator too with two masters somehow related to education. She teaches 8th grade English but has also taught highschool.
She can't write or communicate at any level beyond typical hairdresser. Considering it's very hard to fail out of most upper level education unless you simply don't do the work at all, we really should stop giving people so much credit for just getting degrees.
It's what you do with it that matters and how you devote yourself on your own time that makes people great. And that's what the previous commenter was doing. Trying to give credit to some education system someone went through is taking away from the person that actually made something of themselves, almost always by themselves.
Side note, I graduated with a MechE degree from UC Berkeley. Decent grades. I can honestly say I learned almost nothing. I just did a ton of work they wanted. If I made something of myself in the engineering field, I promise it wasn't because of UC Berkeley.
Okay, fair. Some people are naturally gifted at these things, and others acquire the skills through extensive work in a non-academic context. I've been told I'm a pretty effective communicator/storyteller, and I certainly never studied it formally.
Apart from a few other factors, the biggest one that stands out is not stringing you along in a click-baity way, instead just asking a question and giving a direct answer right after the question and in simple direct words.
No dark patterns to make you spend a longer time on the webpage for ad metrics.
The author Tomas Pueyo grew up in a family of filmmakers. For his Stanford MBA he specialized in behavioral psychology, design, storytelling, and scriptwriting. I have to imagine that has some influence on his writing
I read it before on Twitter, it’s probably adapted to fit into the 280-character limit.
Bingo. For all its flaws, Twitter threads can be a nice way of delivering a point. I think the character limit implicitly encourages a kind of brevity which you wouldn't get anywhere else.
https://x.com/tomaspueyo/status/1807380049605091537
Highly entertaining, keeps you surprised as you never know what's happening next, and full of images without being memes. Loved it.
It's roughly in the style of a children's picture book. That's the same style the best startup pitch decks are written in.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading the post. A breath of fresh air among all the click-bitey and false buildup so common in content these days. PLEASE DO TRAIN THE GPTs ON THIS GUY
I thought it would be dense, but it was lighthearted and didn't take itself too seriously, and both shared information and fun questions to ask. I enjoyed the speculation which had not even a shred of political or social agenda anywhere in sight. Just pure fun.
> Is there a name for this simple style of writing?
4th grade English
I hate it. Seems to me it's full of clickbaits. "Find out what happens next", "What's going on?", "What's happening?", "So why is Chile so long, but not longer?".
I can't stand it to be honest and stopped reading because of this.
honestly it feels like a powerpoint presentation in an article.
I also had fun reading the article & repeated question - why is Chile so long? and sharing another bit of twist. Nicely done.
Apparently it started as a series of xhits or whatever they’re called this week.
Another interesting fact about Chile is: no compass is needed. The mountains show where the East is. If the East is to your right you are facing North, otherwise you are facing South.
In fact, it’s so easy to know where North is that it’s very common to use cardinal directions when describing locations or meeting points in Santiago, as opposed to using landmarks. For example, when meeting a friend you may say “I’ll meet you on the north-eastern corner of the crossing of Pedro de Valdivia and Irarrázaval Avenues”, and everyone involved will know what that means.
Relatedly, one of the claims made about the Pirahã people is that they have no words for left and right in their language, instead they orient themselves relative to the river bank.
The coastal mountain range reaches heights of 3000m, it's not as easy if you are in the valley in between these mountains and the Andes because you'll be surrounded by mountains.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilean_Coast_Range
But those don't have snow in them. It is easy to tell them apart.
This is also true of long linear coastlines, such as the South Coast of England, where (ignoring small bays and harbours), if the sea is to your left (right) then you are facing west (east).
I was briefly disoriented when I stayed on the North coast of Cyprus where the situation is the opposite.
I had a similar feel driving through Croatia, although not as extreme: If you don't hit the sea or a border crossing, you are going in the right direction! (With a tau/2 ambiguity you can resolve using the sun)
Same thing I use the Empire State Building for when in lower Manhattan. Granted that works over a much smaller area...
Minor nitpick (for the Spanish language table) - Chile's ISO code is CL, not CH. CH is Switzerland.
Which was a bit confusing for me when I first entered the Schengen zone by plane. After a long flight I really wanted to believe my country code was CH
[dead]
On the difference of Chilean Spanish to other "dialects":
> It’s the farthest region from Spain, so the least communicated to the rest of the empire, and hence the one that drifted the most from the homeland.
Er... if you look at the table (https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1272,c_limit,f_webp,q_...), Chile has quite a lot of red, but actually its Spanish is closer to the Spanish from Spain than that of other South American countries. So it looks like those have drifted further from "standard" Spanish, while Chile hasn't as much?
> So it looks like those have drifted further from "standard" Spanish, while Chile hasn't as much?
I think the chart is saying less about differences relative to Spanish Spanish and more about each regional dialect relative to the others.
In the table, the countries appear to be ordered (horizontally as well as vertically) by distance relative to Spain. Assuming there's nothing (like an ocean) to prevent the diffusion and evolution of language, given any cross-location in the grid, the cells nearest should theoretically have little to no gradient.
That's clearly not the case with Chile and isolation due to the Andes seems like a reasonable cause.
Colombia and Costa Rica also exhibit this effect, though, and I'm not sure why. FARC? They are separated by Panama and the PCZ; has the canal had an effect of preserving Panama's cultural ties relative to other countries at the expense of those of CO/CR?
Edit: s/Columbia/Colombia/; s/expensive/expense/
These differences go back much further in the past, so FARC has nothing to do with it in Colombia (it’s spelled with an “o”). There’s a large linguistic diversity within these countries, which that table doesn’t reflect or account for.
> There’s a large linguistic diversity within these countries, which that table doesn’t reflect or account for.
I’m pretty sure that’s the case for every country in the world.
Of course, all I said was that the table doesn’t account for it.
Aside from that, judge for yourself: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colombian_Spanish
Please note that there is no "standard" Spanish. In the Spain there are multitude of dialects and different variants. Even in the same region (e.g. Andalusia) you can find a ton of different variants. All of them are valid, as the RAE and the AAL make it clear.
Spanish can use four or five dialects, plus Vasque that is a totally different isolated language. But they all talk also bare metal Spanish.
Andalusians will change naturally to a more standard and fully intelligible Spanish when talking with somebody from Zaragoza (or even with Andalusian people that use a different accent). And any educated person can write fully understandable standard Spanish.
RAE is supposed to be the prescriptive source for Spanish, but no one cares about it outside of a subset of Academics in Spain.
Thanks god we don't care. Spain wanting to dictate what's real "spanish" is like the King of England telling a jamaican that their english is wrong.
Argentinians do care since 1931, date where they founded their Academy of Language [1]
[1] https://www.asale.org/academias/academia-argentina-de-letras
If you want to be more widely understood, it's better to sound more like the King of England than whatever your local variety is.
I tone down my (English language) accent when speaking to foreigners all the time. The point is to be understood.
I'm toning it down right now in this message. I want to be clear to a wider audience, not folksy.
So is Spain really telling other people the way they speak is "wrong", or is there simply a prestige accent, best utilised for international communication so the maximum amount of people can understand?
No, it has nothing to do with accent (phonetic). It's entirely language. They have a long history of "forbidding" words that are "real or not real spanish".
And by the way, counterintuitively, languages have NOT evolved to be better understood, but on the contrary, to "separate" or create cohesion in smaller groups.
"Spain" is not forbidding anything, the RAE [1] and the ASALE [2] are working together in keeping a common tongue. Don't allow some chauvinistic view to cloud your judgement.
[1] https://www.rae.es/
[2] https://www.asale.org/
Eg. "La red" vs "Internet" back in the late 90s/early 2000s.
Guess which word took precedence?
Yes, we leave that kind of thing to the French
From what I heard the French can also have a laugh at the AF's attempts at language standardization.
There are royal academies in each Spanish speaking country. Is a very old institution that creates diplomatic links and a help net between countries on everything related with the Spanish dictionary. They solve doubts for free, or publish American Vocabulary dictionaries (so American people can understand other American people).
If you want to understand Spanish this is the best resource available
https://www.rae.es/
Not all people in this academy descend from the Borbons. Not all people there are from Spain. All are voted by their peers based in their perceived merits. Is a meritocracy, not a monarchy.
Some people appreciate the fact that there are experts on Spanish language trying to help everybody. Other will keep saying the equivalent to "Experts thing that are better than me" or "Death to conquerors. Mine is better, Murica!!". Everybody has their own choice, but the reward is ending with a language that nobody will understand. A very silly prize.
They have a long history of being proscriptive for anything that isn't "their real spanish" (that being of Spain). In latin america, we use a lot of neologisms ("commitear", "pushear", "mergear") and those are strictly "prohibited" by them, to the point that some spanish universities, following RAEs recommendations, fail students using them.
Any centralized institution that is in charge of overseeing a large and diverse number of countries that have evolved spanish over the past ~400 years is, in my eyes, set to fail.
Now, I do use RAE all the time to check definitions, but I see it as a "descriptive" body, in charge of creating some definitions. But even some of those definitions have to be "scrutinized" and can't be literally and blindly trusted. For example, check the definition of "gitano", which has a clear pejorative connotation. That is not wrong, is just the reality of how the "spanish speaking world" expresses itself. But should you take that definition by heart? I don't think so.
This is a clear example of "The Cathedral vs the Bazaar", as in Open Source vs privative software. I'm a hacker, I prefer a bazaar to a single institution dictating how we should talk..
You know that the RAE [1] work together with the Asociacion de Academias de la Lengua Española (ASALE) [2], right? You are showing the RAE in bad light, while both the RAE and the ASALE work together when creating new editions of the dictionary or new grammar rules.
About your "neologisms", no they are calcos or loan translations [3], they are not neologisms. They would be neologisms if they were new words, not copy of words from other languages.
[1] https://www.rae.es/
[2] https://www.asale.org/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calque
Agreed! Prescriptive language bodies are dumb and prevent languages from organically evolving.
Something that wasn't mentioned here before is that Chile is quite close in terms of grammar. Other South American countries supposedly have deviated more.
It's hard to understand some Chilean speakers but that's because they don't modulate their voice and cut or join words. But grammatically they are "correct".
There is a lot of Chilean slang and it's almost universally understood from north to south. But people are aware of it, it's usually not used at work. And then there are a lot of words which are just different, just about every fruit has a different name.
Chilean Spanish is heavily influenced by Spanish, German, Italian, and Croat immigrants from a pronunciation and colloquialism standpoint because those were the 4 main immigrant communities to Chile.
Also, Spain Spanish is not necessarily "Standard" (Castilian) Spanish.
My opinion as Spaniard and having a chilean close, is that Chilean Spanish is the closest to mine in terms of pronunciation. And to me what makes the biggest difference is not European migration but native words.
The main influences are Mapudungun and the Andalusian accent due to many early immigrants coming from that region. Neither German nor others were numerous enough to influence the Chilean dialect, especially in the capital (Germans and Croats mostly got lands in the south).
> Neither German nor others were numerous enough to influence the Chilean dialect
I’ll just say: kuchen, cachái.
But cachái doesn't come from English-speaking immigrants. It's just one of the many English loanwords present in modern languages. And despite living in Valdivia –a city that once had street signs in German– I can't recall any other German loanwords aside from kuchen.
> It's just one of the many English loanwords present in modern languages.
Which other modern language uses cachái, with the same spelling, in the same context as Chile?
> I can't recall any other German loanwords aside from kuchen.
Still influenced the dialect, didn’t it?
I was trying to say that loanwords are generally present in languages. Modern German itself has many weirdly used English words without any immigrants to bring them in the first place.
> Still influenced the dialect, didn’t it?
A few food names do not qualify as "influenced the dialect" for me. Mapudungun did influence the Chilean dialect, but German did not. I generally find the "German influence in the south" very exaggarated and a cover-up for the fact that the primary influences in the south have always come from Mapuche culture.
But there's a broad veneration of Germans and other Europeans, combined with a disdain towards indigenous peoples and their cultures, so the "German South" myth withstands, along with that one photo of Puerto Varas taken from the right angle to make it look like a German town.
> Modern German itself has many weirdly used English words without any immigrants to bring them in the first place.
This is correct. Case in point: Beamer.
> A few food names do not qualify as "influenced the dialect" for me.
For you. That doesn’t change the fact that the term has widespread use all over the national territory.
> Mapudungun did influence the Chilean dialect
If you want to stress the point, I’d additionally argue that a larger amount of indigenous-derived terms (including several words for vegetables) came from the Quechua. Although, according to your own set of criteria, a few food names would not qualify.
There are more Quechua words, but yes, a few food names are not "language influence" in any seruous way. French influenced English and Russian, Arabic influenced Spanish, but the only linguistic legacy of Germans in Chile are kuchen, strudel, and some weird last names used as street names.
> a few food names are not "language influence" in any seruous way
Your conclusion is then that Chilean Spanish has no Quechua language influence in any serious way?
> the only linguistic legacy of Germans in Chile are kuchen, strudel, and some weird last names used as street names
You forgot bocha, polca, and murra.
You keep either missing or intentionally misinterpreting what I'm saying, and then arguing against your own interpretation. So let's end it.
> murra
It's mora down here.
More than any of that, it's influenced by Mapuzungun in a way other countries just aren't exposed - Argentina's Conquest of the Dessert was more brutal, and is the only other modern country where Mapuche land was.
Desert, n, stress on the first syllable, means a place without much rain, but it comes from the notion of being deserted so sometimes it just means an unpopulated area.
To desert, v, stress on the second syllable, means to leave/abandon something.
Desert, n, stress on the second syllable, is what you deserve "he got his just deserts"
Dessert, n, stress on the second syllable, is a sweet course of a meal that follows the main course. It has an extra s because of its etymology not its pronunciation.
I'm quite sure this mess was designed to be as confusing as possible.
Thanks, I don't normally make this kind of phonetic mistake. Didn't even notice.
That's why I put it in quotes :)
Spain Spanish isn't "Standard" Spanish though. The closest thing to "Standard" Spanish is what the RAE prescribes, but no one listens to them. Insurgencies and protests were fought over this fact in Spain during the Francoist and Post-Francoist era (eg. Andalusian, Murcian, Canarian, Leonese)
New Mexican Spanish is similarly isolated, but the number of speakers is tiny.
Orale! Was not expecting to see us New Mexicans get called out here on Hacker News, but you're not wrong. It's surprising how much variation there is despite NM being so close to Mexico.
"Standard" Spanish is modern, and, like Chilean, has itself drifted from dialects which were spoken in the era of Spanish colonization.
That spanish similarity thing can't be right. Argentina and Uruguay speak basically the same spanish (unless you count dialects like Cordoba)
Argentinian here; yeah it's bullshit, also there's no single "Argentina spanish" or "Spain spanish", Andalusian is very different from Madrilean etc.
I have to say though that Chilean spanish is commonly considered quite hard to understand, they speak really fast with lots of mannerisms and "can't understand a single thing of a Chilean speaking" is a common meme in Argentina at the very least.
Absolute bullshit. Though, I guess it doesn't measure accents idioms. The referenced paper seems to be using this database: https://www.hcias.uni-heidelberg.de/en/research-at-the-hcias...
And even that data is kind of suspect, based on a simple glimpse at the screenshot, which shows idioms for "ISN'T IT?". Colombians definitely would say all of the following, unlike shown in the table:
And actually would probably not say "si?" as shown. "Verdad?" might be heard, but maybe an older generation.It is just bullshit.
From my experience, (Portuguese native speaker who learned Spanish) Colombian Spanish is much easier than Mexican. And the worst Spanish, by far, is from the Dominican Republic. Chile is not that bad, it is quite close to Argentinian, actually.
Spanish my second language and I concur
The Chilean Spanish portion of the article made me laugh. I'm a Spanish speaker and the Spanish I speak is closer to Mexican Spanish. I could not for the life of me understand Chileans I met in Canada. Brings back funny memories of 2001 for me.
All of this is just because Chile is the best country of Chile... if you know what I mean ;-)
Somo el mejor país de Chile hmno.
As a Chilean living in the US, seeing this on HN made my day - it’s not often the rest of the world (outside of South America) remembers we exist.
Believe me, not being remembered by the rest of the world is sometimes a blessing.
Chile feels like the Canada of South America in some ways. Even has a special work visa category with the USA!
It completely ignores the influence of the indigenous languages in the "dialect" or variation of Spanish, which is actually a much better explainer than "distance from spain".
Huge mountain ranges separating people that are close in distance is a pretty classic mechanism of creating linguistic diversity / dialects in places that are physically close to each other. You see this with villages in various parts of Asia historically.
Indigenous language effecting Spanish is something that would effect everyone in South America, so even if you remove Spain from the table, Colombia, Chile, the Caribbean and Costa Rica will all stand out about how "different" they are from the rest of South America, probably from their physical barriers separating them from the rest of the continent.
I don't think that's a good hypothesis, because in that case, other countries with a huge colonized population such as Mexico or Perú would have less intelligible dialects as well.
Not all Latin-American countries experienced the same level of mestizaje and colonization. The southern part of Chile, in particular, was never successfully colonized by the Spaniards, and mapudungún, the language of the Mapuche people who live there has had (and continues to have) a tremendous influence on Chilean Spanish.
If all articles were written like this, straight to the point and only the important bits, I would read a lot more and skim a lot less...
Is there a single chilean dialect? Surely in such a long country there must be a huge difference between northern, center and southern chilean.
Dialect and language are sort of a "coastline problem". You can find variation between two neighboring villages if you like, but at some point you have to draw a boundary around a group of speakers and call it a dialect. I'd assume the common dialect of Santiago, where most people live in Chile, is considered "the Chilean dialect," but it almost certainly sounds different in rural areas.
There are regional variations, but the difference is less than what you would probably expect, applying mostly to intonation/cadence (more marked and melodic in the south, less so in the north) and some vocabulary. Most of the variation in Chilean Spanish is based on socioeconomic status, since Chile's income inequality is rather high.
> [...] intonation (more marked and melodic in the south, less so in the north)
Oddly enough, albeit anecdotal, this is true everywhere; in every country and every continent, people are looser in the south. That said, if it's also true for Chile then it means it's not related to the climate.
> in every country and every continent, people are looser in the south
Fun to think about, but I'm sure there are as many counterexamples as there are examples. In the Germanic languages, for example, no one could deny that Swedish or Norwegian are much more sing-songy than stodgy German.
> people are looser in the south
What does “loose” mean in this context? My first impression would be that the accent in northern Chile is “looser” than the south.
surprisingly (to me), Chilean accent is pretty much the same anywhere in the country
Off topic, but that correlation matrix of "Spanish similarity" seems a bit odd. I'm from Argentina, and the spanish in Uruguay sounds practically the same. At least A LOT MORE similar than Cuban or Paraguay as it shows there.
I'm sure that has a lot to do with the close physical proximity of the capitals of Argentina and Uruguay.
When it comes to dialects and accents I find Chileans to be very easy to understand. I believe Don Francisco from the famous show Sabado Gigante con Don Francisco is Chilean. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A1bado_gigante It was aired in Univision and they ensure that the Spanish covers the Americas. Another of my favorite shows that should be part of the article for culture sake is the Chilean show: 31 minutos. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/31_minutos where the Spanish super clear. Maybe is because is an educational show. Anyhow great Chile article. Thanks. Go Chile! Next time. (They are out of Copa America).
The Atacama Desert is so dry NASA uses it to stimulate Mars. Wikipedia also lists five (!) observatories (one under construction, to be home to the Extremely Large Telescope), including the Very Large Telescope (built), ALMA (built), and others.[1] It's basically as close as you can get to space while being on the ground on Earth. [1] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atacama_Desert#Astronomical_observatories
This is super interesting. Sharing with my kids who are starting geography in school this year.
> Far south: too cold for another country
Chile has an Antarctic claim going all the way to the pole. If you consider that, it's impossible to go further south
If you don't, then we still just run out of land in the Continent. Note that the neighbour competition also applies to Tierra del Fuego, as we've had tensions with Argentina through history over the control of Magallanes Channel.
Chileans also believe they own the moon.
Source: I lived there
Better source: https://www.marcachile.cl/en/interesting-facts-about-chile-a...
Not a lot of people actually believe that Chile owns it, but it's true that our national registry allowed a guy to register it as his land (he needed to be a land owner to enter a club). It's used as a fun fact by most.
The Antarctic claim is taken seriously, though. It comes from The Treaty of Tordesillas
Absolutely amazing example of data journalism. Perhaps not all maps are created by the author originally, but such articles show very well how text paired with maps can greatly enhance the overall amount of knowledge transferred. ESRI have some similar articles in their Living Atlas using maps from it also. Not sure whether there is another like... easy/standard alternative, but the potential for such articles is huge. It is very possible that each serious article can benefit from some maps.
From the post: "You see how red Chilean Spanish is? It means it’s quite different. In the beginning of Grad School, I could understand all my Hispanic classmates, but I had a hard time understanding the Chileans!"
As a native Spanish speaker, I find this quite interesting. For me, Chileans are within the category of "easy to understand" while I might struggle a bit understanding some accents that the article qualifies as easy or normal.
What I find even more amusing is that one of the hypotheses for why Chilean is so different is that "It’s the farthest region from Spain, so the least communicated to the rest of the empire, and hence the one that drifted the most from the homeland.", and when you check the graph it's one of the closest Spanishes to Spanish Spanish ^^
No excuse for not building one giant high speed multi-tracks train line from North to South then :)
In the 2000s the Chilean state railway company was involved in a huge corruption scandal as well as bad administrative practices. It’s been slowly recovering, but rail services in Chile still leave a lot to be desired.
Whatever for? As TFA notes the vast majority of Chileans live in the middle, in or near Santiago.
Except that the people are not spread that far out that it makes economical sense.
That sounds like the kind of investment in the commons that a socialist would make. In 1973 the US encouraged a coup to ensure that no such investments were made (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Chilean_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...). Instead, we applied guns to the affected area and ensured that they would part with their resources as "fair free-market prices" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Boys). They've started the process of removing those policies, but only in the last few years.
If I had to come up with an excuse for not having trains, I'd chose that.
That's why Chile is the most successful economy on the continent.
Objectively false: under the dictatorship half a country lived in extreme poverty, while the economic growth happened with the reforms of the democratic governments in the 1990-2000s.
Anything else is military coup laundering.
I won't try to speak for the Chileans, but while I was there I did not get the feeling that they are happy about the intervention. The more I learned about my country's role in their history, the more surprised I was that they were being so nice to me. (I was there, along with my naiveté, to see a solar eclipse, so the cultural stuff I picked up along the way was a bit of a surprise).
The country is still polarized to some extent so YMMV, depending on who you spoke with.
Chilean dialect of spanish is wild. Only a chilean can understand this:
"el weon weon, weon."
In general, other south american countries consider chilean not spanish
The "another language" myth is extremely exaggerated, but it's not even close to be one – speaking as someone who learned Spanish in Chile.
Care to translate it for us? gpt says “The dude, dude dude”
I'll do my best: "That guy is pretty dumb, man."
That jabroni's a real jabroni, jabroni.
"weon" is a corruption of the word "huevón", that means literally "big egg".
Is a polysemic word, but when used as adjective means "somebody with big balls"; by extension "somebody that spends the day sitting on their own testicles, unable to carry them"
So a huevón is "a lazy lad", "a douchebad" or simply "a dude" (colloquially and vulgar, but also playful if applied to a close friend).
The word is a minefield, some people will feel amused, other insulted, and is a faux pas with women. Better avoid it unless you know what you are doing.
I think the most similar word/phrase in English is "son of a bitch"
It can be an angry insult, a demeaning adjective, a term of endearment, an expression of surprise or bewilderment, ...
The real value of this words are not in their literal meaning. Is an interesting question, in fact
When Chileans drop 'weon' ten times in two minutes in their conversations what they are saying is "I'm not Argentinian".
This is the real message.
Because Argentinians would use their trade mark "boludo" instead. Boludo is exactly the same that Weon. A boludo is somebody with "big balls". A weon is somebody with "big eggs". Both words have small differences in their meanings but are mutually exclusive (You either use one or the other). They are tribal tags.
If you want to do business with a Chilean, knowing were to casually drop 'weon' in an --strictly-- informal context is pure gold. It grants instant ghetto pass. Mexicans or Argentinians have their own equivalent words. If you use the wrong password the doors will close, so is risky and you need to dominate the context and use it sparingly. The overuse could be socially awkward and outdated (Imagine somebody from Sevilla going to Texas dressed on a fake cowboy disguise, pretending to walk like one and talking to you about business while spitting tobacco and flashing a weapon. Is 120% stoopid).
Spanish world is complex. Latinos can belong to several worlds at the same time. Lets take for example the singer Gloria Stephan. Gloria Stephan is a 100% USA citizen. But it was born in Cuba so felts Cuban traditions also as part of her culture. And her Grandparents are from the North of Spain, so Gloria Stephan identity is an USA-Cuban-Spanish-almost-Irish music star.
Most Latinos learn soon to adjust their different identities to the context appropriate, and wear or drop their accents and languages accordingly.
On the other hand, when somebody choose to say 'mergear' instead 'mezclar', the message for millions of people is: "look ma, I'm talking English. Almost". As the band Blur would say: "He'd like to live in magic America with all those magic people". Youngsters crave for acceptation and local friendship, so Spanglish or local accents are seen as something very valuable for making relationships
But grown people needs to adjust the message later. If you are a Chilean that migrate to Spain and keep saying "weon" all the time, what you are remembering to everybody is "I don't belong there".
And is the same problem with Spanglish. If you want to use English, by Pete's sake, talk in the most correct English that you can afford. Get the respect that you deserve, instead to introduce yourself like a wannabee latino redneck. If you need Spanish in business, the safe baby-proof choice is to learn neuter Spanish. Period. Will provide the most bang for the buck. But don't be ashamed to wear the multiple rich cloaks of Spanish in your benefit in the correct contexts.
That guy is an asshole, man.
Gpt4o says “the dude is an idiot, dude”
I don't know but a Peruvian once told me that when God created South America he gave the Peruvians the titties from lake Titicaca and Bolivia got the shit left over.
I never quite figured out what it meant.
“caca” means shit in Spanish, so is a word play with titi-caca and probably a xenophobic remark about Bolivia
Habla suave, caga duro as he says.
Reading the title, my initial expectation was that this was going to be a Croatia/Bosnia-Herzegovina situation. Refreshing to read that most of the reasons here are geological/meteorological in nature.
I love how effective the article is at communicating. A digestible idea followed by visual example. Rinse and repeat. I think we could learn something from this for our documentations, or even Jira comments.
"""
Peru & Bolivia went to war with Chile for that region, but they lost in the War of the Pacific.
Why fight? Natural resources: guano and saltpeter.
Back then, guano was the world’s main fertilizer (and this area had most of the world's guano, thanks to the climate).
"""
That fertilizer produced iconic advertising in mid XX Century Portugal and Spain: https://c8.alamy.com/comp/AR22G9/nitrato-de-chile-advertisin...
This article is awesome. I've always wondered why Chile is that shape and I didn't know about the Chilean dialect of Spanish being so far off from the others. Super cool.
Trivia question: how many time zones does Chile have?
Given that Chile only covers about nine degrees of longitude, the reasonable expectation is that it only has one time zone (excluding any far-flung territories and whatnot). I'm sure you're going to surprise me with the true answer :-)
I had to google, I'm surprised that it's 3, I would have assumed that it was just one since it's so narrow.
Everybody forgets Easter Island! (And the other one in the Magallanes and Chilean Antarctica region was added not long ago, 2017 IIRC.)
I assume maybe the other one is to align more closely with Argentina or something? If you look at the time zone map, they just as easily could have had the whole mainland country on one timezone. Bolivia, Paraguay, and parts of Brazil share the same timezone as the northern part of Chili and are just as far east as the southern parts of Chili.
Easter Island makes sense, you don't necessarily expect islands that are far away to share the mainlands timezone. Antarctica is one that probably catches a lot of people since most time zone maps don't even bother to include it and there is no real population there.
> I assume maybe the other one is to align more closely with Argentina or something?
It has to do with differences in latitude. In winter, the southernmost region of Chile[1] was completely dark at around 4 PM with the old time zone. Staying on summer time for the whole year gives its inhabitants an additional hour of sunlight.
[1]: Which includes, but is not equivalent to, Antarctica: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magallanes_Region
> Staying on summer time for the whole year gives its inhabitants an additional hour of sunlight.
Now that's not really true is it :) It's robbing Peter to pay Paul.
ah, interesting. I hadn't even thought about the latitude.
I was in Santiago for a month last year. It's a beautiful city and people are very friendly. I could not visit the desert in the north, but have heard wonderful stories about it. I really wish I am able to go there again.
Also, I had no idea Chile is sooo long.
It's important to note that, in some interpretations, it could be much, much longer:
https://craigcalcaterra.com/blog/long-chile-ohio2-and-the-sn...
> But in this part of the world, the mountain chains start from deep under the sea, which generates archipelagos rather than a continental sliver.
Technically New Zealand is the exposed portion of a continental sliver.
From the same author, somehow related to the topics and maybe a bit more interesting : https:/unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/the-rain-shadow-effect
This is such a clear and engaging read! I wish all articles made learning this fun and accessible
As a Valdiviano, I find the Santiago climate too hot and dry. I prefer the south.
Am I misreading this or is that "How close is Spanish from Different Countries" graphic kind of jank? There's intersecting lines that are missing, like Puerto Rico and Dominican Republic.
The intersection between Puerto Rico and Dominican Republic is the 0.42 right above the "1" in the PR column (5th from the left).
If you imagine the full graph of all countries horizontally and vertically, there would be a lot of overlap (the PR column and DR row, and the DR column and PR row). So to save that redundancy, for all countries except Spain (very top) and Argentina (far right) you have to look around a bit to see where it crosses any other given country.
Cool article. TIL I learned that Atacama has flower blooms.
I miss the Inca though. Talking about Chile without mentioning the Inca Empire is like talking about Italy without mentioning the Roman Empire.
Enter the Mapuche (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mapuche), whom the Inca tried (and failed) to conquer.
I'm surprised no one mentioned Indonesia, which is about 5k km west to east, compared to Chile about 4k north to south
A really good read! Chile's position in the map always had me ask lots of questions and found most answers in this article. Thank you!
I’m gonna round trip motorcycle that later starting with Colombia
Sounds beautiful. Good luck with your trip.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGFR86yIyyA
That map of Spanish dialect difficulty... I can confirm.
I'm a native English speaker. I learned Spanish pretty fluently in Chile, interacting with native Spanish speakers from several countries, and my personal experience doesn't entirely match the map. Chilean and Argentine are definitely harder. I don't think I've met a Venezuelan or Panamanian to compare. Colombian was the clearest, most comprehensible accent of any I encountered. Easier than Mexican and Peruvian that are both marked as easy on that map.
I'd assume there to be regional variations like most countries, right? Hard to blanket one way or another.
For example, my wife learned English later in life and can understand neutral/midwestern American fine, but has tons of trouble with southern and northeastern regional accents.
I know Chilean accents get harder to understand the further south you go. More idioms and slang and more dropped letters in speech.
Chile is a great country, greetings from Saint Bernard
I'm also from St.Bernard, greetings my fellow Bernardian!
Should’ve put it in that other meme collection thread!
I've always concluded entirely based on maps, not historic facts, that it was conquered with a strong fleet and not enough infantry.
What made you reach that conclusion? I’m just curious.
I've never been to Chile, but the few Chileans I know have the clearest Spanish I've heard.
Hmmm. From my travels through Latin America, I would rate Colombian accents as by far the easiest to understand. Without exception, everyone spoke with clear diction and enunciation. I would definitely not rate it "very hard" - that would be reserved for the Honduran accent, which I found incomprehensible even spoken s-l-o-w-l-y.
Looks like they're rating "difficulty" as "difference from Spanish in Spain". Considering that Spaniards only represent about 10% of the total Spanish-speaking population, I'm not sure that's fair.
A lot of Spanish speaking memes and videos I see have this running joke that Chileans are hard to understand. I don't think it's a literal truth or meant to be taken seriously. They just hand pick a few examples of people who talk very fast, which exist in most Spanish speaking countries (in Spain, Andalusia would be it). There are similar videos in the same circles talking about how hard English is based on a drunk American redneck fisherman or Adele's working class London speech. It's just a meme.
These memes are popular in Latin America, it's definitely not just a Spain thing.
I don't think the cross-comparison chart is based on Spanish from Spain: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...
Yeah based on my in-laws, Chilean seems understandable, though they tend to speak fast.
Argentine Spanish is the strange one, due to the heavy Italian influence.
I saw an interesting video showing Argentines in the 90s vs Argentines today, both in BA with more or less the same age and status, and the former group had way more of that "Italian" sounding accent. I think it's going away or softening over time. A shame, because I like it.
many nation shapes don't make any sense. add in the wildly disconnected/schizophrenic sovereign territory of some countries (US and Russia among exemplars) and I've learned one must simply turn one's brain off when analyzing them. Its a circus.
It starts to make sense once I see nations as collections of big cities holding arbitrary (terrain may matter here) amount of "wastelands" between them. In general, no country would generate from those wastelands so it make sense that it's arbitrarily exchange between big cities surrounding them.
good mental model, agreed
oddly, why was this also at the top of my twitter feed?
Because the author tweeted it? It’s a new article
yes - but i don't follow him. yet there is was. i guess some sort of promotion.
I don’t think it’s a promo but can’t be sure. I think the algo puts tweet threads that people you follow engage with (read the whole thing, like it, etc).
Originally posted on X: https://twitter.com/tomaspueyo/status/1807380049605091537
Whoever downvoted this deserves to be straight out banned. My linked source is from the same guy and is older!
soooo, purely topographically, Chile is the Hoboken of Sud America?
Andes mountain range. simple.
Wena weon!!!
They should make it longer.
Bolivians and Peruvians might disagree, violently.
The andes
Because Andes?
See also “chilean empire map” (it’s not serious).
https://img-9gag-fun.9cache.com/photo/aBneQZZ_460s.jpg
If we were superb at building ships and living on the seas, Chilean Empire would have been a thing.
Because Chile renounced Patagonia to keep Argentina out of the war with Bolivia and Peru. Argentina is the bully around here.
This site owner is living the small-web fantasy we HN'rs keep talking about.
There are lots of substack sites like this. Probably the new blogspot. The newsletter modal is because that's a choose piece of substack.
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Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I repented. Publicly, to be an example.
Everyone who doesn't post these is already a public example.
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Report this account, it's copying comments.
This Chile is too long too...
Isn’t the answer obvious? They were trying to make it look like a Chile pepper.
90% of the content is stolen from other people without appropriate or any attribution.
Isn't this the covid "Hammer and Dance" article author? Not getting another click from me for the rest of my life.