Rare medical condition
When travelling in Spain a cab driver asked my friend how old she was. She tried to explain that she was 23 years old: Tengo veintitrés años, literally "I have 23 years". Unfortunately she pronounced años as anos which means, well, let's just say the English word is very similar. A medical first surely?
Editor's note: The ñ sounds like ny as in the name Sonya.
Sent by: Helen
Comments
I imagine this is a fairly common mistake... and yet I didn't discover it until my fourth year of Spanish, when we started to go over the history of the Iberian Peninsula, and a lot of dates were involved in our written assignments, so far as I can recall. It took me a while to figure out the ñ key, so much of my written work emphasized the connection of historical events with large quantities of anuses, such as 1145, 1423, or 1830.
My wife had just completed her Spanish homework assignment when I noticed that there is a 'Translation' function in Word. When I pointed this out to her she tested her newly typed Spanish text by getting Word to translate it back into English. Instead of translating Ignacio tiene treinta y cinco años as 'Ignacio is 35 years old' it translated it as 'Ignacio has thirty and five anuses'.
The number of my students who regularly say cumpleanos instead of cumpleaños is amazing...despite being warned that anos are not años!
A closer match to the Spanish sound represented by the letter 'ñ' is contained in the Italian word 'lasagna', which most English speakers manage without difficulty.
In the past I couldn't figure out the accent and tilde symbols on my computer. I was always extremely embarrased to write cuantos anos tienes. I now know how to insert the tilde or I write it phonetically as 'anyo'.
An enthuastic Spanish learner I know once announcedTengo 37 anos , rather than ańos . Therefore, rather than being 37 years olds, he has 37 anuses.
cono , not a cońo .
Similarly, be careful when ordering an ice cream to ask for a
Flag this comment