Language Tidbits

So this first tidbit should interest a lot of my readers because it pertains to ENVIRONMENTLLY FRIENDLY stuff. There´s a clean energy company here called "AlmaSol." Okay, what´s the big deal. A clean energy company. Well, I only realized the interesting homophonal qualities of this word when my mind, to understand it, translated only half. "Sol" is a word I´m quite familiar with (sun, for those of you with minimal Spanish). But "alma" is a word I´ve probably looked up a dozen or more times in the dictionary and it means "soul.¨ So when I translated the first half (all I needed to) of the company "AlmaSol," I was left with "SoulSol," which, of course, is a pair of homonyms. An interesting tidbit only available to the partially bilingual.

That was interesting, this next tidbit is a little more politically charged. In English, there´s no adjective or noun to refer to someone from the United States. We use the term American as both a noun and adjective to serve this purpose. ¨The American went to the store, and he bought some American brands." Well, that´s all well and good unless you´re American and not from the United States. For example, if you´re Brazilian, Mexican, Honduran, Panamanian, Colombian, or any other number of nationalities in the Western Hemisphere.

Of course, Spanish, being the language for the majority of the aforementioned disenfranchised people, does have a term for an American or something American: estadounidense. Literal translation: stateunitedian. Slightly more manageable translation: United Statesian. Translation of leftist academics who feel the English must have such a word: Usamerican. Now, I can see one of these academics, who I have branded leftist, at Dickinson reading this, and thinking that I´m poking fun at them... I am. I think the chances of Usamerican entering public discource range from supremely unlikely to downright impossible. That being said, I´m in agreement with them in principle. English does need a term that isn´t so ethnocentric. While I´m making fun of leftist academics (again, I basically agree with them) let me translate the last sentence into sociologese: "The use of the term American oppresses all those people who are American without being what the use of that term implies, ergo it´s racist and should be struck from the English language."

Okay, so that´s enough making fun of leftist academics. Indeed (for Peter), they have a far better grasp on reality than their conservative counterparts. But before I get myself going on another long-winded rant about rightist thinking is internally inconsistent, maybe I should point out another language tidbit or two.

I have been happily pleased with my astute prediction that there would be a significant number of long words which I would know precisely because they´re long words and so therefore come from Latin. Of the abundance of times one of our professors has asked as "¿Sabéis lo que es (said word)?" it seems there have been only a very small number of occassions when I have not known the word. And the majority of those times, it´s because I don´t know the word in English. For example, our History of Art teacher was surprised that we knew who the Visigodos were. Well, it doesn´t take a language expert to figure out that the Visigodos are the Visigoths. Similarly the Fenicios are the Phoenicians and Romulos y Remus y la Loba are Romulus, Remus, and the Shewolf.

Similarly, my host mom tends to assume I know all but the lengthiest of words, when in fact, many of the shorter words she uses I am absolutely clueless about. (I have just ended a sentence with a preposition, which is in fact, grammatically correct. I refer all of you who doubt this to consult some grammar experts online. You will undoubtedly find one or two who insist that ending a sentence with a preposition is grammatically incorrect, but the majority seem to be in agreement that it is, in fact, permissable. The false presumption that the ending of a sentence with a preposition is not permitted comes from a desire to "Latinize" the language. English, however, is not derived from Latin, and so therefore is not bound the constraints of Latin languages. While I´m going in this direction, I´ll also note that the splitting of an infinitive in English is also permitted. Think of Neil Armstrong´s famous quote "to boldly go where no man has gone before." For those of you getting angry that such a long section is in parentheses, suck it up and read the name of my blog.) The result of my host mom assuming that I know all of these smaller words is that when we talk about quite simple things I´m more or less clueless (okay, that´s totally an exaggeration), but if we talk about more complicated things, like, say, politics, so many of the words are cognates that I manage much better.

Righteo, well, that should about do it with the digressions for today. Hope you enjoyed them. More to come Monday after my visit to Córdoba and Granada.