It’s great that more Spanish speakers, along with other Americans, are being covered under Obamacare, but I had to wince when I saw this photograph in the New York Times. How hard would it have been to put an accent on inscríbete, and inverted question marks before the shirt’s five questions?
Just nit-picking — mostly, I was thrilled to see the Spanish.
I like to participate on Reddit (/r/Spanish) because it gives me the chance to help people around the world who are learning Spanish. It makes me feel just a little young and cool. And it also helps me improve my own Spanish.
The latest Spanish expression I picked up on Reddit is this post’s title: “No hay pan para tanto chorizo”. This translates literally as ‘there isn’t enough bread for all that sausage’:
foto de José Andrés, http://joseandres.eu/
You can guess the expression’s figurative meaning if you do a Google search, finding images like those below. (I recommend that you do this search yourself, too, to see the variety of images.)
[The use of pa instead of para in the poster on the right, by the way, is a common abbreviation in casual speech that is often reflected in informal writing, such as music lyrics and texting.]
[I love the way the cigar, monocle, and top hat transform the sausage on the left into a “fat cat”.]
Chorizo is a pork sausage, but has the secondary meaning of “crook, thief” (who knew?). Pan ‘bread’ can be used, as in English, with the metaphorical meaning of “daily sustenance”. As one Redditor explained, when you put these meanings together you get something like “The thieves (corrupt politicians) are taking away our food and money”. It is therefore a popular slogan to use in political demonstrations.
The English expression “pork barrel politics” feels somewhat related, although the Spanish inclusion of pan brings it home to the average Joe.
With civilization under attack from both terrorists and demagogues, the idea of a blog post nit-picking President Obama’s Spanish definitely feels — trivial. However, we all do what we can. I have no idea how to bring about world peace. But I hope that by sharing some useful insights into the world’s second-most-spoken language, I might, in my own way, bring the world a little closer together.
Terry Byrne of USA Today pointed out to me that Obama mistakenly said Es un nueva día ‘It’s a new day’ in his introductory remarks at his joint press conference with Raul Castro. This occurs toward the end of the clip below. Because día is masculine, the correct Spanish would have been un nuevo día. I also noticed that Obama began his remarks by wishing the audience Buenos tardes ‘Good afternoon’ instead of Buenas tardes, with the -as ending on buenas matching the feminine gender of tardes.
Noun gender — the difference between masculine and feminine nouns — poses a steep challenge to English speakers. The fact that Obama made these mistakes even though the correct Spanish was surely written in his notes reflects this difficulty. Beginners tend to ignore gender completely, especially when adjectives are separated from their controlling nouns (e.g. La casa es bonita). Even advanced non-native speakers make mistakes. I know that I still do, from time to time.
While Obama’s two mistakes — buenos for buenas and nueva for nuevo — both involved gender, they had different triggers. The first mistake was most likely a carry-over from the more common expression Buenos días. The fact that tarde ends in an -e, so that its gender is not obvious, may have played a contributing role. The second mistake was undoubtedly driven by the fact that día appears to be feminine because it ends in -a. In an earlier post I explained the historical roots of this irregularity. Essentially, dies, the Latin source of día, was the lone masculine among a set of Latin words (the “fifth declension”) that all came to have -a endings in Spanish. Others include materia/madera (both from Latin materies), especia (from species), and rabia (from rabies).
It’s particularly interesting that Obama correctly said un (masculine) and then changed the next word, nuevo, to nueva (feminine). I can think of two reasons why this happened. The first is that un isn’t as obviously masculine as nuevo because the final -o of uno is dropped in this context. The second is that nuevo immediately precedes día, so that the -a ending of día might have exerted a stronger pull.
Changing gears from linguistics to literature: in the speech that Obama gave in Cuba the next day, he quoted the Cuban poet José Martí’s “Cultivo una rosa blanca”, which alludes to the possibility of peace between long-time enemies. You can hear this reference at 1:30 in the clip below. I got a big kick out of this quote because I had just assigned the poem in my intermediate Spanish class. I can’t think of a better, and more timely, demonstration of the importance of literature!
I am enjoying a short vacation in Amsterdam. It’s one of my favorite cities: tremendously livable and walkable, with beautiful parks and museums. While surrounded by the Dutch language, though, I find my thoughts drifting toward Spanish. This is partly because I’m always thinking of Spanish anyway, but there are also four specific reasons.
This divide indirectly explains a geographical oddity: the city of The Hague, some 41 miles south of Amsterdam, is the seat of government of the Netherlands today even though Amsterdam is the country’s constitutional capital. To quote Wikipedia (since I’m a linguist, not a historian): “After the Napoleonic Wars, modern-day Belgium and the Netherlands were combined in the United Kingdom of the Netherlands to form a buffer against France. As a compromise, Brussels and Amsterdam alternated as capital every two years, with the government remaining in The Hague. After the separation of Belgium in 1830, Amsterdam remained the capital of the Netherlands, while the government was situated in The Hague.” Who knew?
Painting after painting in the Rijksmuseum, which I visited today, portrays the war between the Netherlands and Spain from the Dutch perspective. An example shown below is Gerard ter Borch’s depiction of the ratification of the 1648 Treaty of Münster, which ended the war between Spain and the northern provinces.
.jpg)
By Gerard ter Borch – www.geheugenvannederland.nl : Home : Info : Pic, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=337672
I’m planning a trip to Spain this summer and am looking forward to revisiting the paintings in its collection that show the same war from the Spanish perspective: most notably, Diego Velázquez’s La rendición de Breda, which celebrates a 1625 victory. Maybe I’m biased, but I think Velázquez blew ter Borch out of the water.
I recently tried out a new idea with an intermediate Spanish class: El día de la poesía (‘Poetry Day’). Each student read a poem from a different Spanish-speaking country and presented it to the class. It was a lot of fun!
Here’s what happened:
My book about Spanish linguistics, ¿Por qué? 101 Questions about Spanish, is now available for pre-order from Amazon.com.
For more information, here is a flyer that includes an outline with a list of the 101 questions.
From the back cover:
¿Por qué? 101 Questions about Spanish is for anyone who wants to understand how Spanish really works. Standard textbooks and grammars describe the “what” of Spanish – its vocabulary, grammar, spelling, and pronunciation – but ¿Por qué? explains the “why”.
Judy Hochberg draws on linguistic principles, Hispanic culture, and language history to answer questions such as:
Packed with information, guidance, and links to further research, ¿Por qué? is an accessible study guide that is suitable for Spanish students, instructors, native speakers, and the general reader. It is a valuable supplementary text for serious student of Spanish at all levels, from beginning to advanced. ¿Por qué? also covers topics usually left to specialized books, including the evolution of Spanish, how children and adults learn Spanish, and the status of languages that co-exist with Spanish, from Catalan to Spanish sign language to the indigenous languages of Latin America.
Judy Hochberg has a PhD in linguistics from Stanford University, and teaches Spanish at Fordham University, New York.
Here for your listicle pleasure are my favorite quotations from Spanish literature, in the broadest sense, that illustrate some of the most interesting facets of the language. The quotations date from the early 13th century to 2011, and come from works of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. Sources range from best-sellers (Don Quijote and El tiempo entre costuras) to Nobel-prize winning literature to academic tomes. The facets illustrated include aspects of syntax, word structure, pronunciation, and vocabulary, as well as language history and dialectology.
¡Que disfruten!