After a few days of hearing from Brazilian friends the wrong pronunciation of the names of the leftist Gabriel Boric and the ultra-rightist José Antonio Kast, I was already thinking about clarifying this point. I was even more certain when I heard the speech of former president Lula, last Saturday, in the Argentine CGT, asking for votes for the “Boriquí” campaign. The Chileans present celebrated, but found the strange pronunciation strange. Later, I saw that this is how Brazilian television news say the leftist’s name is. It’s worth tuning in with the correct pronunciation, after all, one of the two will be elected president of Chile next Sunday (19).
There is also a preference adopted in Brazil to refer to the leftist by stretching out his name, and ending it with an “i” that does not exist in the official pronunciation. Sort of how Brazilians transform Facebook, calling it “facebooki”. In this logic, Boric, became “Boriqui”.
There is also another detail, the original name of Boric’s Croatian family has an accent in “c”, which indicates that its pronunciation would have to end in “ch”. Therefore, to correctly say the name of the Chilean candidate, the correct one is “bórich”. So explains Soledad Chávez Fajardo, from the linguistics department at the University of Santiago.
But the ultra-rightist Kast is not free from having his name mispronounced. People who don’t know German often refer to it by saying “Kest” or, as in the English verb “cast”, where the “a” sounds like an “e”. It’s not like this. In the case of the German name of Kast, the “a” has the same “a” sound, and very open. It is then, as it reads, “Kast”.
There is another curious point involving the two names as well. According to the “Gran Dictionary of La Lengua Croata”, edited in Zagreb in 2006 by Novi Liber, one of the meanings of the word “boric” is “pine”. Hence the fact that his militancy adopted the emoji of a tree when referring to the leftist.
With Kast something unusual happens, critics of his project and his candidacy call him “Pepe” Zanjas. The “Pepe” comes from the way the Josés are called, in Spanish. “zanja” means “ditch” in Portuguese, and refers to the obstacles that Kast wants to build in the north of the country to prevent immigrants from crossing the border. “By not writing his name, we give less space to the searchability of news related to him. As well as the names of Bolsonaro and Trump were publicized a lot, and they ended up being elected, we want to avoid this overexposure, we speak among us, supporters from Boric, that Kast is the “Pepe” Zanjas. The nickname has spawned a lot of memes that can be found on social media.
.
