AUTHENTIC Pronunciation of Joaquín -- How Native Speakers of Spanish Say It

choi

On Mar 9, I had a posting whose title was "Gay Men":

Andrew Rannells, The Tallest Man I Ever Loved; When manifesting a boyfriend, don't start with a physical, or date the competition. New York Times, Mar 3, 2019 (in the column "modern Love").
[URL omitted]

My comment:
(a) I thought for several days whether this is good story. Maybe not. What the author said is her boyfriend left him when he landed a coveted job and appeared to be successful.
(b) But this is not what I appreciate this article. When I came to US to attend graduate college at University of Illinois at Chicago, my roommate was a first-year medical student. Both are heterosexual. One day he mentioned that he had once visited London, and commented about a park where gay men would walk a pattern as a secret code to advertise themselves as gay. Dor decades many American men (all white) hit me up, saying they were gay. I was puzzled  what they gave me a pass. After reading this article, I guess gay people do not know whether another is gay, unless the other person says so. (As for my experience, my guess is American gay men are bolder, just like many other -- but not all --  Americans.)
(c) The verb manifest has the usual definition.

manifest (v): "to make evident or certain by showing or displaying"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/manifest

A librarian says the subtitle is badly written (by editor, of course). The subject (he-- the boyfriend) is omitted, though it is a different subject from that of "don't."  In other words, the boyfriend manifested himself, after the author had daydreamed.
``````````````````````
That night, I figured out the librarian, a white native speaker of English, was wrong -- though she was correct in saying the physical is physical appearance, not sex. For the latter, see Olivia Newton-John's 1981 song Physical (lyrics: "Let's get physical").

The subtitle "When manifesting a boyfriend, don't start with a physical, or date the competition."  The subject of the clause omitted is not his boyfriend, but rather "you." So the original sentence (before omission --for lack of space) is: When you manifest a boyfriend, don't you (or you don't) start with a physical, or date the competition.


===========================================================================
Francisco J Vare, Master Spanish Vowels with Diphthongs, Triphthongs and Hiatuses. FluentU, undated.
https://www.fluentu.com/blog/spanish/spanish-vowels/

Quote:

"All Spanish vowels are pronounced in the exact same way every single time. * * * Their [Vowels'] length is also always the same

"When two or more vowels appear together, we get a diphthong, a triphthong [ignore this for the moment] or a hiatus. * * * Simply put, a diphthong forms when two vowels are combined into a single syllable. * * * Spanish diphthong can only be formed if we have at least one unaccented weak vowel (the word unaccented is very important here, as you will see in the hiatuses section). * * * the two Spanish weak vowels are i and u. [The author declares in this Web page that he did not want to talk deeply about Spanish vowels, but in Spanish, a, e and o are strong vowels.] * * * The pronunciation of the vowels in a diphthong is not different from the pronunciation of each vowel separately [eg, Spanish noun masculine aire (meaning air] has a diphthong that is pronounced the same as English pronoun I].

"The easiest way to define a hiatus is as being the opposite of a diphthtong. We already know that a diphthong is formed when a weak vowel is accompanied by another vowel in the same syllable. In turn, a hiatus exists when two vowels are together but they belong to two separate syllables. Consecutive vowels can be in two syllables because the vowels are both weak or strong, or because the weak vowel is the stressed one in the word.

"1. Simple hiatuses[:] These consist of two strong vowels or two weak vowels: * * * oa: koala ([English:] koala), loar (to praise), anchoa (anchovy)"

My comment: I ask a native speaker of Spanish about Spanish pronunciation -- see (a) to (d)-- which was confirmed by another native speaker on the spot.
(a) The English noun koala is derived from Australian aboriginal language, whereas English noun anchovy descended from Spanish noun feminine anchoa.
(b) In Spanish, the "oa" is pronounced in two syllables: o and a.
(c) In Spanish, the consonant j is pronounced like h in English (eg, Jose).
(d) Hence Joaquín has the first two syllables pronounced (the English way) ho-a. The en.wikipedia.org page for San Joaquin River is Americanized, pseudo-Spanish, pronunciation.