Have you noticed that Spanish speakers usually shorten PARA TO PA and merge 3 or 4 words in to one, for example, ES PARA MI HIJA becomes ESPAMIJA, I suppose that you could call this Street Spanish, does anyone have more examples of this sort of language?
Oh yes, that's pretty common. It's the closest thing to a "contraction" that you'll see in Spanish
[by that I mean in English our contractions have apostrophes like "wasn't", "can't", "isn't", "won't"]
para turns to pa or sometimes it's pa'
The joke is something like una pa mĆ y una paella "one for me" and then pa ella "for her" vs. the food paella
You'll sometimes see para nada "not at all" turn into pa na or pa nĆ” because the nada gets shortened too
There's also por which can get shortened to po [especially in Chile po' is quite common] - you'll also, or sometimes pos which is somewhere between pues and por supuesto
[something else I've heard is that some accents turn words that end in -uego to -ogo... like juego can sound like "jogo", fuego to "fogo", luego to "logo"... not sure if that's a contraction or just the accent]
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The really basic one is mijo/a which is from mi hijo/a "my child"
But another really common thing you'll see is that words ending in -ado/a will sometimes have the D sound disappear so you end up hearing a lot of "ao" sounds
And especially in the Caribbean you'll hear tol dĆa for todo el dĆa "all day"
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Oh and this was extremely common (I think it still is), but
ĀæOntas?
ontas is fuckboy Spanish for ĀædĆ³nde estĆ”s? "where are you?" but in fuckboy lingo it means "you up?"
Like the joke is if you hear ontas someone's trying to hook up with you
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The boring standard answer is that there are two to know
The first is that in older Spanish, vos used to be the way to politely address someone - we're talking Medieval to like 19th century - and they used the vosotros form, so kings/queens would address other dignitaries this way, this was how you spoke to nobles etc. A lot of fairy tales would use this form, and this is before it became less formal
The standard term of address was Vuestra Merced which was like "Your Grace" for someone you didn't really know their title, kind of "your lordship/ladyship"
Over time Vuestra Merced turned into Usted
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The second one is grammatical which you probably know but -
When you deal with a or de + a masculine noun with a definite article, you will use al or del because the vowels merge
... a + el + banco turns to al banco "to the bank", and de + el + mundo is del mundo "of the world"
This is especially something you need to know for indirect objects; al profesor le gusta "the professor likes", or al hombre no le importa "the man doesn't care"
There's no changes for feminine nouns; a la biblioteca "to the library" or de la mujer "of/from the woman"
