Monthly Archives: December 2020

An imperfect novel

This post is about the eleventh and most recent book in Jordi Sierra i Fabra’s “Inspector Mascarell” series, Algunos días de noviembre, which I finished reading last night. I called this post “An imperfect novel” for two reasons. First, the book contains a fascinating use of the Spanish imperfect tense, which I’ll get to later. But also the novel itself, while enjoyable, struck me as imperfect because it added little to Sierra i Fabra’s serial depiction of life under a dictatorship.

The plots of the previous novels in this series have blurred together for me, but my impression is that they have all related to broad political themes. This is most obvious in the first novels, which take place just before and after Francisco Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War. Out of the later novels I remember one that involved an attempt to assassinate Franco, one that featured Civil War graves (or was it missing soldiers?), one about Communists, and so on.

In contrast, the plot of Algunos días de noviembre concerns a theatrical agent who receives threatening letters, and a murder that then ensues in his circle. I kept waiting for something to happen that would tie in this plot with Sierra i Fabra’s major themes. The mystery itself was enjoyable, and I ended up pushing on to the last chapter to find out what happened, but it never made sense that Mascarell, and not some other detective, would be pursuing this investigation.

Beyond this (for me) major problem, Algunos días has all the familiar and pleasurable plot elements of a Mascarell novel, which to this habitual reader feel as comfortable as slipping on a favorite pair of shoes: Mascarell’s traversal of Barcelona, his family (no spoilers!), his dislike of chatty cab drivers, his skill in interviewing suspects and other persons of interest, and his dogged pursual of the truth at any cost. You do learn something about the theatrical and cinematic scene in Barcelona in the early 1950s, thanks to Sierra i Fabra’s research in newspaper archives as described in an afterword.

One of these days I am going to reread these books while consulting a map of Barcelona. The novels have a strong sense of place but I am mostly reading them ‘blind’ beyond major landmarks such as Diagonal, a major street in the city, and the Tibidabo hill.

The Spanish in Algunos días also strikes familiar notes. I’ve previously written about Sierra i Fabra’s ample leísmo and his use of both the -ra and -se imperfect subjunctives, sometimes juxtaposed in a single sentence. The book includes two or three instances each of the verb restar and the noun horma, both old favorites of mine. Beyond these details, I got a kick out of following the often elliptical Spanish in the book’s many casual conversations between Mascarell and his partner David Fortuny, such as the following:

Mascarell: Venga, vamos.
Fortuny: Pero déjeme a mí, ¿eh?
Mascarell: Toda suya.
Mascarell: ¿El arma?
Fortuny: Ni rastro.
Fortuny: Caray, usted impresiona, ¿eh? Sin decir que es policía, la gente se lo suelta todo.
Mascarell: Quien tuvo, retuvo.
Fortuny: Una chapuza.
Mascarell: Más bien sí.
Fortuny: Pero contando con lo aislado que está esto y que nadie sabe mucho de Romagosa…
Mascarell: Lo lógico es imaginar que nadie daría con el cadáver en días, semanas, incluso meses.
Fortuny: Mascarell, ¿por qué habla en plural? “Lo mataron”, “lo arrastraron”, “le quitaron”…
Mascarell: Deformación profesional. No me haga caso.

Reading exchanges like these is like watching a Spanish movie, but without the challenge of understanding rapid speech!

[Spoiler alert!!]

For me, however, the most intriguing bit of Spanish in the novel was the following sentence, which means ‘Concepción Busquets hired them to solve the case and died a few hours later,’ and appears just after Mascarell and Fortuny learn about Busquets’s murder.

Concepción Busquets les encargaba resolver el caso y moría a las pocas horas.

It struck me as bizarre that the verbs encargaba and moría are in the imperfect past tense, which Spanish normally uses to describe ongoing events or to provide background information. Moría, for example, would usually be translated as ‘was dying’ or, in another context, ‘used to die.’ I would expect this sentence to be written instead in the preterite past tense, which is normally used for sequences of events, i.e.

Concepción Busquets les encargó resolver el caso y murió a las pocas horas.

or perhaps

Concepción Busquets les había encargado resolver el caso y murió a las pocas horas.

thus combining the pluperfect había encargado ‘had hired’ with murió ‘died’.

I consulted a variety of sources to solve this riddle, and was amazed to find out how many tertiary uses the imperfect has. The Real Academia Española’s authoritative Nueva gramática de la lengua española describes several less-common uses of the imperfect, none of which accounts for the Concepción Busquets example:

  • the imperfecto onírico o de figuración, which describe dreams (I knew about this, but it doesn’t apply here);
  • the imperfecto de cortesía, which describes present actions politely (doesn’t apply here);
  • the imperfecto citativo, which tactfully distances the speaker from a presumed fact he or she mentions (doesn’t apply here);
  • the imperfecto prospectivo, which talks about things that were going to happen (doesn’t apply here);
  • the imperfecto de hechos frustrados, like the former use but applied to events that didn’t actually happen (doesn’t apply here);
  • instead of the conditional in the “then” part of an “if…then” sentence (doesn’t apply here).
  • The Gramática‘s example of the imperfecto de interpretación narrativa, which describes an action that follows another, is eerily similar to the example at hand: Apretujó mi mano con su mano sudorosa y a los dos días moría ‘She grasped my hand with her sweaty hand and died two days later.’ However, this explanation would leave encargaba unaccounted for.

I had better luck with Ronald Batchelor and Christopher Pountain’s Using Spanish, which points out that “the imperfect is often used in journalistic [officialese] in place of the Preterite.” This could apply in the case at hand, since Mascarell is stepping back and summing up the state of the case. However, my favorite interpretation comes from a native speaker on reddit.com/r/Spanish who thought the imperfect in this context expressed irony. That’s a perfect fit, but I wish I could cite a published work rather than a miscellaneous redditor.

So, all in all, a difficult sentence. I welcome additional theories.

As a final note, Sierra i Fabra’s afterword includes his chronology in writing this 313-page book. He outlined it in five days and wrote it in eighteen. ¡Caramba!

The joys of proofreading

As I mentioned in my previous post, recently I have been immersed in correcting the proofs of my new book and creating an index for it. A few days ago I finished proofreading and emailed back the corrected proofs. The index is basically done but I want to hold onto it a little longer just in case I think of some improvements.

It occurred to me that some aspects of the proofreading process might be interesting to my readers. Those of you who have published a book yourself may find some points in common. Otherwise, you might be surprised at how many different types of problems can crop up along the road to publication. Leaving aside gory details having to do entirely with formatting, such as subsections accidentally being promoted to sections and vice versa, I made a total of 166 corrections to the proofs.

Proofreading is the fifth stage in book production. In my particular case,

  1. I submitted my original manuscript in Microsoft Word, with one file per chapter.
  2. The publisher’s copy editing team edited each file, making comments using Word’s tracking functionality.
  3. I reviewed the edits; my job was to accept, reject, or comment on each one.
  4. Taking into account this review, the publisher produced a typeset version of the entire book in a single PDF file.
  5. I read the proofs and entered my comments in the PDF, using Adobe’s commenting functionality. (I also made a complete printout to work from, but found that the online version was easier to study closely. However, I used it when creating the index.)
  6. I will supply said index.
  7. The publisher will correct the proofs based on step #5 and add the index.
  8. Publication!

Of my 166 corrections, only four of were “do or die.” That is, I can’t imagine the book being published with these errors uncorrected. The first two were essentially “slips of the tongue” on my part — one in English and one in Spanish — that led to nonsensical text. I’m horrified that I made these goofs in the first place, and surprised that they made it as far as the proofs. (As my late sister used to say, “There’s a reason why they included the word mistake in the dictionary.”) The third was a doozy of a typesetting error, and the fourth was a genuine content error. Chances are nobody but me would ever had noticed it, but I had to make it right as a matter of academic integrity.

ErrorWhat happened?
“Most Latin Americans use the two singular pronouns and usted and the plural pronoun vosotros.”I meant ustedes, not vosotros.
La “a personal”, una estructura que evita mencionar la persona que causó un accidente, también afecta el pensamiento.I meant “se accidental,” not “a personal.”
“Real Academia feminine”The copy editor changed my original Española to Español, which I requested they change back to the feminine form Española. Guess I shouldn’t have used the word “feminine.”
“Of the sixty-three other languages Dahl surveyed, only Kikuyu, a Bantu language of Africa with seven major TMA categories, surpassed Spanish.”Having reread my original source, I now see that Catalan also has more major past tenses than Spanish, as shown below, though Spanish is still an outlier. Fortunately I was able to fix this easily, by adding the 2 words “Catalan and.”
Catalan and Spanish both have imperfect, simple past, present perfect, acabar de immediate past, progressive, and pluperfect. But Catalan also uses the verb anar ‘to go’ to make a periphrastic past tense (instead of a future). Based on Osten Dahl (1985), Tense and aspect systems, pp. 170-71.

A few dozen corrections had to do with typesetting conventions for talking about language. These corrections fixed errors that for the most part, were not present in my original manuscript, but were introduced during copy editing and typesetting.

  • Italics were a real nuisance. In linguistics, as in normal typesetting, we use italics to indicate words that are being talked about rather than being used for their own meaning, whether in another language, as in “My favorite Spanish word is disfrutar” (which happens to be true), or in the text’s own language, as in “My favorite English word is salmon” (I just made that up). If a block of text is itself in italics, a word referred to should be in plain roman, as in “The many descendants of Latin ille.” I corrected 29 cases of italics that should have been roman or vice versa, mostly in the book’s headings and subheadings.
  • It’s a linguistic convention to indicate suffixes with a hyphen (e.g. -zco verbs) and likewise to enclose meanings between single quotes (e.g. Latin ille ‘that’), not double quotes. After step #3 above (copy editing) I caught many missing hyphens, and instances of double quotes instead of singles, but a handful remained. In general these errors were not present in the manuscript, but were introduced during copy editing or typesetting.

I made a few dozen corrections to the Spanish in the book. These fell into five categories:

  1. The Oxford comma, as in the second comma in I like vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry. Spanish doesn’t use the Oxford comma, but I’m addicted to it, so this is a hard error for me to avoid. I removed several such commas in step #3 but found twenty (!!) more to remove in the proofs. I hope this has cured me from making the same mistake in the future.
  2. Accent marks. I’m glad to say I did a decent job catching my own accent mark mistakes earlier in the publishing process, but I found two more in the proofs: the missing accents on rincón and one instance of yeísmo. All the other occurrences of yeísmo or yeísta in the book had their proper accents, so I don’t know how I missed this one.
  3. Punctuation. For some strange reason, punctuation such as commas and periods precedes quotation marks in English, as in “I love you,” he said. Spanish is more sensible, putting such punctuation after the speech being quoted, as in “Te amo”, me dijo. I found and corrected one or two instances of English-style punctuation in the page proofs. (My fault.)
  4. Hyphenation. Routledge hyphenated the book as part of the typesetting process. Since Spanish syllabification is one topic I explored in the book, I was amused to find four Spanish words that were incorrectly hyphenated. Obviously Routledge’s software wasn’t programmed for Spanish syllables. The problematic hyphenations were:
    1. pensam-iento (the syllables are pen.sa.mien.to)
    2. pert-enecer (the syllables are per.te.ne.cer)
    3. ust-edes (the syllables are us.te.des)
    4. nu-era (the syllables are nue.ra)
  5. Other mistakes. My Spanish will never be perfect! I caught some missing prepositions, as in el uso DE los signos invertidos and diferenciaban ENTRE sujetos, and a couple of gender errors.

My English is better than my Spanish, but that didn’t stop me from making some mistakes in my own language, such as dropping the the in during the activity, or forgetting the closing comma in an appositive clause (“The teacher first identifies an interesting text, such as a recent article in the Catalan edition of El País (cat.elpais.com) [missing comma here] and reads the first few paragraphs”). Some errors were introduced during typesetting, such as dropping another the in the book’s introduction (“for (the) Chapter 4 in-class activity”). I hope I found (and fixed) all of these.

I tried to clear up inconsistencies, from the spelling of descendants to the capitalization of WebQuest to the uniform use of English terms for places (Cadiz, not Cádiz; Basque Country, not País Vasco) and languages (Mozarabic, not mozárabe).

Finally, I made about two dozen “corrections” that were really improvements, both in punctuation and in wording.

Latinx

I am working ferociously to finish correcting the page proofs for my new book, and to create an index (a painful task that I actually relish), so this is just a short post to say “hello” and share an interesting article I just read in the Washington Post about the word Latinx.

Latinx is an example of gender-neutral Spanish, one of several attempts to reduce or eliminate the use of -o and -os for masculine words and -a and -as for feminine word. In standard Spanish latino (note the lower-case l) is simultaneously masculine and neutral, so it can be used to identify either a Latino male or a Latino of unknown gender, as in La empresa espera contratar un latino para ese puesto ‘The company hopes to hire a Latino for that position.’ Likewise latinos refers to either a group of Latino males or a group of Latinos of mixed gender, male and female.

As in English, where the normative use of he has ceded ground to they, in today’s Spanish many speakers (and writers) try to avoid using gender-specific endings. In Spanish-speaking countries one often sees the @ character (called arroba in Spanish) used as a neuter vowel, as in this ‘Welcome refugees’ sign I saw in Valladolid a few years ago:

The x is also used as an alternative to the @; that’s the source of Latinx, which in my experience is found more often in the United States than in Spain, at least (I can’t generalize to other Spanish-speaking countries).

Anyway, the Washington Post just ran an op-ed, by their reporter José A. Del Real, asserting that “‘Latinx’ hasn’t even caught on among Latinos. It never will.” The article is behind a firewall, so here’s the key claim in case you can’t access the article:

“The label has not won wide adoption among the 61 million people of Latin American descent living in the United States. Only about 1 in 4 Latinos in the United States are familiar with the term, according to an August Pew Research Center survey. Just 3 percent identify themselves that way. Even politically liberal Latinos aligned with the broad cultural goals of the left are often reluctant to use it.”

The anti-Latinx reasons cited in the op-ed are its awkward pronunciation (especially in the plural), the preference among LGBTQ Latinos for Latine, and resistance to stamping a broad community with a single ethnic label. (The latter makes the term Hispano equally problematic.) The op-ed reports that “people of Latin American ancestry in the United States often prefer to describe themselves by referencing their specific countries of heritage, according to a 2019 Pew survey.”

Top 10 slides from my new book

  • As I described in my previous post, each chapter in my forthcoming book is accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation. The presentations display explanations and descriptions, diagrams, word lists, sample data from research studies, maps, quotations, images, and links to other images as well as articles and videos. Some slides provide instructions and supporting materials for in-class activities and take-home projects. The PowerPoints are in Spanish except for an occasional English translation.

The five PowerPoints contain more than three hundred slides in total. You can follow this link to download a PDF file that reproduces my fifty or so favorites, two per page. Besides its title, each slide is identified by its chapter and slide number. Please notice and respect the copyright notice on each page.

Narrowing down further, I created a SlideShare presentation from my “Top 10” of these slides, which you can click through below. It includes examples from all five chapters, thus representing my five “essential questions” for the Spanish language classroom.

Here’s why these slides made my Top 10:

  • Slide 1.21, because the Real Academia Española’s 1763 spelling guide shows both the invention of the inverted ¿ and ¡ marks (blue highlighting) and why the Academia thought they were needed (yellow highlighting). How often does one get to observe the invention of a new language feature? It’s reminiscent of Scott Fahlman’s invention of the first emoticon in 1982. As noted in the slide, the RAE actually invented the inverted marks in 1754.
  • Slide 2.29, because this is one of my favorite metaphors for the difference between pretérito and imperfecto.
  • Slide 2.43, because it illustrates the value of the often-mystifying “personal a.”
  • Slide 3.58, because it demonstrates the variety of languages that Spanish has borrowed words from. The PowerPoint version of this slide (not the SlideShare version), is animated so that students don’t see the “answers” (the language each word came from) until the profe clicks on the slide. There is also a more challenging alternative version that lacks the list of candidate languages.
  • Slide 3.78, because it shows that a little bit of language history goes a long way toward explaining irregular verbs in modern Spanish. A teacher can display this slide in class while saying something like “La forma irregular conozco viene del verbo latino original, cognoscere”, with an emphasis on the sc.
  • Slide 4.41, because the average Spanish student has no idea how many Latin Americans still speak indigenous languages. The contrast with the situation in the United States is startling.
  • Slide 4.53, because I was so happy to find a single illustration that covered so many sociolinguistic bases.
  • Slide 5.9 out of sheer vanity. This slide illustrates one child’s early semantic extensions of some early words: he extended manzana from apples to other fruits, guaguau from dogs to other animals, and agua from water to various objects connected with it. I was tickled pink that I came up with the idea of using colored ovals to neatly distinguish these three groups of words.
  • Slide5.23, because our students will be happy to learn that kids learning Spanish as a first language make the same mistakes that they do!
  • Slide 5.31, because these data on adult native speaker speech errors are not well known, yet provide a fascinating insight into the psychology of language. The thought clouds show what the speakers intended to say. The PowerPoint version of the slide is animated; students have a chance to deduce these meanings for themselves before teachers click on the slide to reveal them.

Book #2 update

My second book, Bringing Linguistics into the Spanish Language Classroom: A Teacher’s Guide, is progressing toward its March 30, 2021 publication date. Although the book hasn’t yet shown up on Amazon it is already available for pre-sale at a 30% discount on Routledge’s website. There you can also see the Table of Contents, which is essentially a list of the linguistic topics the book covers.

To be perfectly honest, I originally conceived of this project as a way to promote my first book, my beloved ¿Por qué?. This is akin to having a second baby just so your first-born has someone to play with. (See also the plot of My Sister’s Keeper.) But like any good writer, or mother, I fell in love with the project for its own sake:

  • as a way to share important information about Spanish with my fellow teachers;
  • for the creativity required to design the in-class activities and take-home projects that accompany each linguistic topic;
  • for the challenge of creating more than 300 PowerPoint slides that teachers can use along with the book;
  • as a way to promulgate the five “essential questions” for foreign language instruction I wrote about here;
  • for the additional insights I gained into Spanish linguistics as I worked on the book.

I submitted my manuscript to Routledge at the end of July. At the end of September I resubmitted it after making some changes in response to a peer reviewer’s feedback. This step was very helpful, which is the whole point of academic peer review. For example, the reviewer pointed out that my section on the history of Spanish pretty much stopped with the conquest of the Americas (whoops), found some Spanish mistakes (¡Ay!), and suggested that I tackle the topic of preterite versus imperfect.

Routledge then turned the manuscript over to codemantra, a book production company based in southern India. (My contact there is a Tamil speaker.) They copy-edited the manuscript and sent it back to me for my own review, which I completed the day after Thanksgiving. I discovered some additional Spanish mistakes, such as a missing accent on marítimo, the invented word *colonista for colonizador, and closing punctuation placed inside quotes as we do in English, e.g. *La “a personal,” for La “a personal”, Between errors like these, and the English typographical errors the copy editor had turned up, I am forcibly reminded of one of my late sister’s favorite sayings, “There’s a reason why they put the word mistake in the dictionary.”

While all this was going on I was working with my Routledge editor on the book’s cover design. You can see the results in this blog’s right-hand sidebar, or click here. I found the speech bubble portion of the cover on the Getty Images website and thought it nicely evoked a classroom environment, The text I chose for the bubbles represents the range of topics and techniques in the book. I am a little worried about the legibility of the word rights in the rightmost bubble, but we weren’t allowed to monkey with Getty’s bubble colors.

Codemantra expects to send me the page proofs in mid-December. I will then have two weeks to create an index, a process I enjoyed when publishing ¿Por qué? There are professional services that will make an index for you but I can’t imagine anyone else understanding the book well enough to do an adequate job. That will be my last input before the book comes out in March.

Between each of these steps I have been working on a new research project regarding Spanish etymologies, which I hope to share with you soon, and also worrying about how to teach my first all-remote Spanish class starting in February. I have also purchased Instagram for Dummies and plan to put it to good use. So, lots to keep me busy!