Blackwell’s, a British bookseller, is randomly selling new paperback copies of ¿Por qué? 101 Questions about Spanish for only $14.62, including shipping to the U.S. This is a great deal as the list price is $32.96. I have verified with Blackwell’s that these are in fact new books, not secondhand.
So if you have been thinking of buying a copy for yourself, or already have a copy but want to give one to your favorite Spanish teacher or hispanophile, now is the time.
I finally added a feature to this blog that has been on the back burner for ages: a list of errata and other possible changes to my book ¿Por qué? 101 Questions about Spanish. I have been keeping this list in the event that Bloomsbury (or another publisher) ever puts out a second edition, and have just posted it as a new page on the blog. This is for the benefit of both readers and myself, as I hope readers will contact me with additions to the list. Hopefully most of these will be suggestions rather than further errata!
The most important errata concern factual errors. Others point out typographical errors and problems with references.
The page is organized by question number.
Have at it!
Hispania, the official journal of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese, has published a review of ¿Por qué? in their June (2018) edition. It is a most complimentary review, with adjectives including “delightful,” “engrossing,” “meticulously researched,” “a joy to read,” “concise,” “brisk,” and “accessible though erudite.” The only thing that would have made me happier is if it had included the magical phrase “Every Spanish teacher should buy this book.” But you can’t have everything!
You can download a copy of the review here. It starts on the second page of the PDF.
Tim Guilford, an educational consultant in the UK, published this kind review of ¿Por qué? in a UK teaching blog. It came out last year but I just saw it.
The text is below:
¿Por qué? – 101 Questions about Spanish is a great read. Working around 101 questions and the answers to them, this punchy format really adds to the book’s appeal.
The range of questions is varied and each section is a nice length for a read on a daily commute or to dip into for a few minutes during a break or before bed.
After every little foray into Judy Hochberg’s book, I came away having learnt something new about the language that I have loved and taught for most of my career. (Slightly embarrassingly too, but in the spirit of honesty, I have to admit that each read also gave me a slightly smug feeling of potential academic one-upmanship, should such questions ever crop up in conversation!)
Judy Hochberg’s explanations are clear and you sense her enthusiasm for her subject. And, yes, these are just the sort of questions students of Spanish ask, every day. Here is an appetiser:
Question: ‘Why do Spaniards use the ‘th’ sound?’
Answer: In a nutshell, in the fifteenth century two consonants ‘ts’ and ‘dz’ kind of got married and the off-spring was ‘th’.
There you are, you see, wasn’t that interesting? Well, I thought so.
My personal favourite is how ‘hay’ can mean both ‘there is’ and ‘there are’? (Surely all Spanish verbs need to be singular or plural?) It turns out this all had its roots in a kind of early, medieval, linguistic existentialism, as the poor old Romans lost all ability to speak Latin properly, “innit tho”. Whilst this must have been a tough time for the purists, I’m glad it happened, because Spanish was thus born and books like this could be written.
Highly recommended!
Bloomsbury is running a February sale: ¿Por qué? is available at 40% off thru February 25. This is a real bargain — 40% is their usual author discount. If you live in the U.S. your total price, including tax and shipping, will be under $25.
In a workshop I recently gave in Atlantic City, I distributed the following list of possible linguistics-based projects for the foreign language classroom. They are adaptable for a variety of languages and levels of instruction. To download a PDF version, click here.
This list is a subset of the projects included in the companion website for my book, ¿Por qué? 101 Questions about Spanish. Here I divided them into the four categories of “Language history,” “The target language in the world,” “Language learning,” and “Language use”.
If you make use of this list, as an instructor or a student, please write back and let me know how the project(s) turned out.
Language history
The target language in the world
Language learning
Language use
It was a real thrill to participate in this weekend’s Feria del Libro Hispana/Latina, organized by the Hispano/Latino Cultural Center of New York. Here are some takeaways from the event.
2. I fell in love with this year’s Feria’s honoree, the poet and translator Rhina Espaillat. She is one warm and classy lady, both accomplished and approachable. She gave a wonderful talk about the art of translation which included several examples of poems she has translated from English to Spanish and vice versa.
3. Another highlight was, surprisingly, a presentation by Mayra Faña on her new book El vino, La bebida intelectual. I say “surprising” because a wine book was the last thing I would have expected to be on the program, which leaned toward poetry. However, Sra. Faña is passionate about wine — her day job is, I think, in engineering, but she gives wine appreciation classes — and wrote the book as part of her crusade to increase appreciation and consumption of wine in the Hispanic community. Her talk was excellent; my favorite part was her discussion of the difference between Argentinian and Chilean wines.
I am myself rather lazy/timid in the wine department, and buy only through established wine clubs. But if I wanted to read a book about wine, it would be this one.
4. I shared a table with Altagracia Cabrera, who has recently published a novel, ¡Dios hazme blanca!, about racial prejudice in the Dominican Republic. She brought her adorable granddaughter and grand-niece to the fair. In this picture you can see them holding copies of the book while wearing their abuela’s promotional T-shirts.
5. The event was catered by La Brisa restaurant in Jackson Heights. So good! But after three days of eating roast pork and tostones (fried plantains), it was a relief to cook up a batch of one of my favorite vegan soups, featuring yellow split peas and lots of vegetables.
For those of you in the New York area, I’ll be speaking 8:00 pm Saturday night at the 11th Feria del Libro Hispana/Latina in Jackson Heights, Queens. You can see the flyer below. I will also have a table to sell my book on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Here is more information about the fair.
The organizers asked me to provide an interesting title for the talk, which I did, but I think the result is a bit confusing because it looks like this is the title for the BOOK. Whatever. Also, they added an (incorrect) accent on lingüista — but at least they remembered the diaeresis (double dots) on the u. As a final linguistic note, note that in the name of the fair the organization went with feminine hispana/latina (to agree with feria) rather than masculine hispano/latino (to agree with libro). I find this disconcerting every time I read or say the name of the fair because the adjectives immediately follow libro.
This talk will be a real challenge for me because it will be (i) to a non-academic audience, (ii) in Spanish, and (iii) without PowerPoint. It will be my first real attempt to promote my book to a Spanish-speaking, non-academic audience. Wish me luck!
When I turned in my book manuscript, Bloomsbury also asked me for materials for a companion website. This website is now online here.
The website includes two different kinds of materials. First, there are ideas for research projects, tied to the 101 questions, that might be appropriate in a Spanish class, or Hispanic linguistics class, that uses ¿Por qué? as a textbook. These include:
Second, there are materials that I trimmed from the book to keep it from getting too long or digressive. These include:
Babel Magazine, a British quarterly about language and linguistics for a popular audience (think Scientific American), has just reviewed ¿Por qué? — and it’s a rave! I’m not hugely surprised, because Babel‘s linguistic consultant, David Crystal, already contributed a favorable blurb for the book’s back cover. But I am absolutely thrilled nevertheless. I thought that the reviewer, Iulia Bobăilă, really captured my intention to present technical material in an approachable way.
When I read that Dr. Bobăilă is a Lecturer at Babeş-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, I had to look up this wonderfully-named city. It turns out to be, according to Wikipedia, not only the second-largest city in Romania, but also “the unofficial capital of the Transylvania region”. How cool is that? It looks like a beautiful city, too — definitely one for the bucket list.
Here’s the review:
