Vesre
Vesre (reversing the order of syllables within a word) is one of the features of the Rioplatense Spanish. Natives of Buenos Aires and Uruguay use vesre sparingly in colloquial speaking, and never in formal occasions. Tango lyrics make widespread use of lunfardo and vesre to highlight the intended underworld atmosphere, or for comical relief.
Other cities in Argentina have their own customs. Rosario has its "gasó" method for obfuscating words (also called "Rosarigasino"), and Córdoba has an entirely different set of colloquial conventions. Yet, most Argentines have been exposed to vesre through tango lyrics or the media.
Even though vesre has spread to other countries, and can be heard in Peru, Chile and Ecuador, Spanish speakers outside the River Plate area are usually less inclined to use it. Popular speech has created some instances; for example, natives of Barranquilla, Colombia often call their city Curramba, in a stylized form of vesre.
Examples
- revés → vesre (reverse)
- café → feca (coffee)
- caballo → llobaca (horse)
- libro → broli (book)
- flaco → cofla (thin man; since the 1970s, usually a colloquialism for young man)
- amigo → gomía (friend)
- doctor → tordoc (doctor, usually meaning physician but also used for lawyers. "Tordo" is standard Spanish for blackbird).
- carne → necar (meat)
- pizza → zapi
- baño → ñoba (bathroom)
- camión → mionca (truck)
- boludo → dolobu (dumb, literally one with big balls)
- mujer → jermu (wife, sometimes also woman)
Occasionally, vesre is a stepping-stone towards further obfuscation, achieved by evolving into a longer word. For example:
- coche (car) → checo → checonato (after a once-famous sportsman named Cecconatto)
- cinco (the number five) → cocín → cocinero (literally cook; used mostly on the racetrack to mean "the five horse")
The original and vesre versions of a word are not always synonyms; sometimes the reversal adds some extra nuance to the meaning. For instance, the word hotel bears the same meaning as in English (i.e. a normal tourist hotel), whereas telo implies that the establishment is actually a love hotel.
In other languages
Colloquial French has a form of intentional metathesis known as verlan.
Tagálog, the language of the Philippines, also has a similar construct known as binaliktad.
Serbian has a form of slang called Šatrovački followed in the 1990s with a more ambiguous slang called utrovački.
In Brazilian Portuguese from Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, the local version is called gualin, from lingua (tongue or language). While it is pretty straightforward, the final "s" in plurals and the final "r" for the infinitive tense of verbs are usually dropped. A typical example is: "Cevô lafá gualin?" (Você fala gualin? Do you speak gualin?).
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