Hola

Sensible people, the Spanish. When greeting each other we Brits routinely shorten good morning/afternoon/evening to morning/afternoon/evening.

Spaniards do it the other way round and truncate buenos dias/tardes/noches to buenos at all times of the day or night. It does make life that bit easier for visitors to their fine country and there's something delightfully optimistic about people meeting and simply saying "good", don't you think?

3 comments:

JD (The Engine Room) said...

As far as I know, it's 'buenos dias' but 'buenas tardes' and 'buenas noches' (because of grammatical gender) – does it shorten to 'buenos' or 'buenas' accordingly? We need a Spanish person really...

When I was in Spain the ending of the shortened greeting sounded really indistinct – more like 'buene' than anything. But then, I don't really have an ear for Spanish so I'd love to hear from someone who knows what they're talking about.

Anonymous said...

I think it might have been and accent thing, lot of the words used when we were in Almeria were pronounced differently to how we'd learnt them. I guess it's like hearing a northern or southern accent?

JD (The Engine Room) said...

If you search Wikipedia for 'Andaluz' you'll find a really good article about the regional dialect... no wonder we were having problems...