http://ww.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/01/13/news/Argentina-Airport-Unrest.php

pandemonium at Ezeiza. if this goes until next week i will not be happy.

Stranded travelers attacked ticketing counters at Buenos Aires' Ezeiza international airport on Saturday, tossing computers in the air and shoving security guards after Aerolineas Argentinas suspended most of its flights there.

Local television broadcasts showed passengers overrunning ticketing counters, throwing computers and wrestling with airport personnel, even as a spokesman for the airline attempted to explain the cause of delays.

Tempers flared as hundreds of travelers awaited word on suspended and canceled flights. Aerolineas Argentinas attributed delays to a labor conflict involving a pilots' union and a union for airport tarmac workers. But union officials said the disruptions were caused by overbooked flights.

Ticketing counters were abandoned in the afternoon after passengers assaulted a worker at a check-in desk, said Maria de los Angeles Aguer, a spokeswoman for the Association of Aeronautical Personnel.

i just got accepted to CELTA school in BA. Argentina, here i come.

http://funtasticus.com/20070711/snow-in-latin-america/

the first snow in BA in 80 years. the climate wackiness is going on all around the world, apparently. but it's not just that. has anyone experienced an unusual bump in the level of just plain weirdness the last few weeks?

http://picasaweb.google.com/dale.morris/BAPictures

BsAs pictures.

i have been a language geek for about as long as i can remember. i studied Latin in high school and Romance linguistics in college. the historical and geographical aspects of linguistics have always fascinated me. how Latin became Romance, how Romance differentiated itself in many areas, how wars and migrations, politics, the Church and technology have all influenced the means of communication. i studied the vocabularies and grammatical forms of classical and "vulgar" Latin, Portugese, Galician, Castillian, Catalan, Ladino, Occitan, French, Romansch, the many Italians, Sardinian, and Romanian. I studied the "made-up" Esperanto, Talossan, and Brithenig. I even created Iermansc, a hypothetical German Romance based loosely on Surselvan with Latin, Gallic, and Allemanic influences.

though having done all that, i never studied the parlance of my current geektastic obsession: castellano Rioplatense. quite an intriguing tongue. it's definitely Spanish. but a strange flavour of Spanish. like the sounds: Rioplatense exhibits "yeismo", wherein the sounds demarked by "y" and "ll" come to be pronounced exactly the same...pronounced as "sh" or lightly voiced "zh". so castellano is pronounced like "kahteshano". speaking of which, "s" at the end of a syllable tends to be weakened to an "h" or even dropped entirely. this might sound like just a little change, but in Spanish -s does some major grammatical work...like marking plurality in nouns, not to mention featuring in quite a few verb endings. those two features alone (the first having affinities with Portugese and Gallician, the latter with Italian) change the sound of the language considerably.

another big difference from your standard Spanish is that the second person singular "vos" form has been retained at the expense of "tu". i have read that this happens in other parts of the Hispanosphere, but that in Mexico and even Spain is concidered archaic (not unlike English "thou"). of course, there is a bunch of other unique vocabulary as well: much of it Italian, indigenous, archaic Spanish or Lunfardo.

to get an idea of the sound of the dialect, here's a video in which the piece "Borges y Yo" is read in the idiom.