Lavengro

Mistakes Spanish-speakers make

In my publicity for Great English Mistakes I list some typical mistakes made by Spanish-speakers. I have been asked for explanations of them.

• People is kind.
Should be: People are kind.
Explanation: In Spanish the word for “people” (gente) is singular.

• Which is your phone?
Should be: What is your phone number? The Spanish would be: ¿Cuál es tu teléfono?
Explanation:
1) “Cuál” conventionally translates as “which” so Spanish-speakers say “which” in questions with unlimited possibilities.
2) The Spanish form does not include the word for number.

• I am interesting to know you.
Should be: I am interested to know you.
Explanation: A common mistake with no obvious cause.

• How many children you have?
Should be: How many children do you have / have you got?
Explanation: Spanish ¿Cuántos hijos tienes? The verb (tienes) is not marked as a question. The meaning is shown by the context, with intonation in speech and punctuation in writing.

• I am sorry, I am constipated.
Should be: I am sorry, I have a cold.
Explanation: Spanish “constipado” refers to a blocked nose.

• I forgot my books at home.
Should be: I left my books at home.
Explanation: Spanish-language interference.

• I came walking.
Should be: I came on foot.
Explanation: Spanish-language interference.

• My car is in the parking.
Should be: My car is in the car park.
Explanation: “Parking” is the Spanish for car park.

• Is very beautiful your sister.
Should be: Your sister is very beautiful.
Explanation: Spanish often starts a sentence with a verb followed by the subject.

• My fathers live in Zaragoza.
Should be: My parents live in Zaragoza.
Explanation: In Spanish “padre” is “father” but “padres” is “parents”. This applies generally, e.g. “rey” is “king” but “los reyes de España” is “the King and Queen of Spain”.

Second language use worldwide

Here is an interesting infographic about second language use worldwide from the Business Insider site.

It doesn't distinguish between:

• Official languages used nationally (e.g. Swedish in Finland).
• Regional languages that are not used throughout the country (e.g. Catalan and Kurdish in Spain and Turkey).
• Recent immigrant languages (e.g. Polish in the UK).

It also shows Belerusian (sic) as a second language in Belarus, which is surprising. According to Wikipedia Belarusian is the national language and Russian has official status.

Toasting the sun

 

I have long known the Spanish expression un brindis al sol as meaning an impressive but empty gesture. The Spanish literally means a toast to the sun, which surely must be a fine example of an impressive gesture that achieves nothing.

It was only the other day that I read a Spanish author who used the expression and mentioned that it originates in bullfighting and has no direct connection with the sun as such. A bullring is traditionally divided into two sections, sol and sombra, which are sun and shade respectively. The sol seats are cheaper and were typically occupied by poorer people who might be enthusiastic but were not as knowledgeable as the aficionados who chose the seats in the shade. A bullfighter who wanted to make an impression might make a gesture to the crowd in the cheap seats by dedicating a particular bull to them. In this case the word would be brindar, which is also to drink a toast. This is the same as playing to the gallery in an English idiom that has the same origin, making a gesture to win easy sympathy and support.

Click here for a full explanation in Spanish.

Images: wine Flickr; torero, moderna tauromaquia

Preposition problems

The Guardian’s letters column has recently seen a discussion about the standard preposition collocation of going up to and down from London, counter-intuitively to the common idea of up implying northwards on a map. I am not sure if it is still the case but I certainly remember the up train and the down train being the common colloquial names respectively for the trains to and from London. When P G Wodehouse wrote

I turned to Aunt Agatha, whose demeanour was now rather like that of one who, picking daisies on the railway, has just caught the down express in the small of the back.

no reader would have doubted that the train was travelling away from the capital towards the provinces.

But this letter prompted me to think about different prepositions.

Wherever your destination, go there by East Coast or Cross Country train and, bizarrely, you’ll arrive into it.

Michael Ayton, Durham

Firstly, this use of into is something that has surprised and puzzled me on British trains. It goes counter to what I explain to my students: that arrive implies position, when you arrive you acre there and thus it takes prepositions of position not of movement. This is particularly important with Spanish students who collocate the preposition a with llegar. As I say in A Guide to English Language Usage and with almost identical wording in Pearls of the English Language:

arrive

This is a verb of position not of movement. It can only be used with prepositions which describe position; it cannot be used with to: He arrived in the pub before me but He came to the pub by bus and We arrived at the airport an hour and a half before take-off but We travelled to the airport by taxi. The most commonly used prepositions are in and at, though other prepositions of place, e.g. on, over, next to, are possible: The plane arrived over Paris at 12.30.

The prepositions in, on and at can cause great difficulty because other languages do not use them in the same way. A Spanish-speaker reads something en un libro or en la página 38 where as an English-speaker reads the same thing with different prepositions as being in the book but on page 34. The difference is easily explained – though in my experience few students have ever met the simple explanation that in means inside and on means on the surface of. Once this is grasped, everything falls into place. The information is inside the book but the print is on the surface of the page; a coin is on my hand if I hold it open and flat but in my hand if I close my fist around it; a table is in the corner of the room because it is surrounded by the walls but you stand on the corner of the street because you are on the ground; you sit in an armchair but on a dining chair. The surface does not have to be horizontal: we say on the floor, on the wall and on the ceiling but German has auf dem Boden, an der Wand and an der Decke because auf is only for on that is on the top of a horizontal surface.

(Click to enlarge image left of in, on & at from Pearls of the English Language.)

Then there is at, a preposition that no other language seems to require. It isn’t in and it isn’t on so what is it? It is for a relation in space that exists between two things but that is not in or on. If you are waiting for a bus, you stand at the bus stop. The stop is a pole so you can’t be in (inside) it and you can’t be on (on top of) it. You stand at (within a few metres of) it but someone waiting for a taxi could be in the same place but standing near the bus stop because there is no relationship between the purpose and the place.

And of course, when you are at the bus stop you could be sitting on a seat in the shelter.

Bus shelter in Zálezlice, Czech Republic, Wikimedia Commons

Tu and vous

One of the biggest problems facing English-speakers learning a feign language has nothing to do with the grammar or vocabulary of the language. It is the social problem of using the familiar or polite form of the personal pronoun. Spanish has the familiar tú and the formal Usted, from Vuestra merced (Your Worship) and takes a third person verb. It’s not always an easy choice. It seems that tú is gaining ground, at least in Spain. Latin America is a different matter; the builder who did some work on my home a few years ago was a perfectly friendly man but he was Argentinian and insisted on Usted. I deal with publishing and distribution companies where Usted seems to be the norm for email but tú is used on the phone. I have heard it said, though I have no evidence, that the Civil War led to a breakdown of formality on both sides and an increasing use of tú. Something similar happened I think, too, after the English Civil War, which led to the disappearance (almost) of thou. The King of Spain, however, has it easy. Everyone calls him Usted and he calls everyone tú.

To make life harder, it’s different in different languages. German for example is much more formal than Spanish. To celebrate Bastille Day the LA Times published an interesting infographic about the use of tu and vous in French. The image cannot be extracted but I attach a screenshot of a part (click to enlarge). The full thing is very well  worth looking at here.

Happy Christmas!

As Brazil prepares for the World Cup …

Catch 22 and translating novels into English

Jerónimo Tristante is a Spanish author of historical novels. In a video chat held in Spanish (text here) he said (my translation):

Will your novels be translated into English?

I have no information about that at present. It’s a complicated move because a European publisher reads in any language: English, Spanish, French etc. but English-language publishers only do so in English, which means that it’s a big leap because translating a work without knowing whether you will get it published is very expensive and uncertain, so that at the moment it is a wall that many Spanish authors find it difficult to cross.

This is something that I knew nothing about, and it is very worrying. I knew that there was little publication in English of works written other languages but didn’t know that publishers wouldn’t even consider them without setting up a Catch 22 situation.

The languages of the USA

I have been asked by Heather Brown, who found me through this blog, to repost this infographic. It is outside my own field of knowledge so I have no comment except to say that is very interesting and that, not surprisingly, Spanish is by far the most widely spoken and studied foreign language.

The original is here.

 

Latin America / América Latina

Lavengro Books are now available in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Panama, Mexico and Puerto Rico.

Click here.

Lavengro Books ya están disponibles en Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Panama, México y Puerto Rico.

Haga clic aquí.

Image Wikimedia Commons

Politics and the Catalan language

This blog is about language, not about politics. Unfortunately however, the two sometimes come into contact and when they do so the result is never happy as it inevitably involves politicians using language as a tool for advancing their own policies of vanity.

Language is a particularly controversial topic just now in Catalonia, where I live. A recent post on the LSE blog by two experienced language teachers in Barcelona* highlights how serious the problem has become. There are memories of the banning of Catalan for public purposes, including education, and these are not far from the stories that I heard in my childhood about the banning of Welsh. So it is especially unfortunate and saddening that we now read this:

Could anyone imagine a situation whereby, in Wales or Scotland, pre-school pupils did not receive even one hour of education in English, only two at primary level and three at secondary? Well, that is exactly what is happening in Catalonia – students are only taught in Catalan [meaning that Catalan is the only language in which they are taught PH]  in their first years of schooling (sometimes they might have an extra hour or so of English, but never Spanish), while for the remaining compulsory education period they are taught in Catalan, except for two or three hours a week in Spanish and English.

As a result of this linguistic immersion:

… the Generalitat (Catalonia’s autonomous government) has made a point of airbrushing the concept of “mother tongue” out of the sphere of education … The very concept of teaching in the mother tongue was also erased, to the point that it no longer appears on any official form or survey. Thus it is rather surprising that those same people who, some years ago (and quite justifiably) championed the importance of children receiving an education in their mother tongue [i.e. Catalan PH] have not only forgotten about their old arguments, they have even caused the concept itself to disappear.

I thoroughly recommend this article to anyone who is interested in seeing how language can be used as a tool for political manipulation of society, and especially of children.

Comments are open for this post (in fact, Typepad does not allow them to be closed for individual posts). Comments on language teaching and social policy will be welcomed but polemical posts about Catalan separatism will certainly be deleted.

*Dr Sonia Sierra is associate professor in the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, UAB (Spain).

Mercè Vilarrubias is a teacher and a free-lance journalist. She’s a specialist in bilingual education and in language policies in European countries