Spanish language stuff part 1: Things not to do

The other day I rang someone who I've been friends with for nearly 50 years. We talked about trees, we talked about fish dying in the Mar Menor and we talked about when organic veg aren't really organic veg. We also talked about language learning. It was that conversation which prompted me to write this two part blog. My pal, who has been learning German for years, recommended a YouTube series called Easy - Easy German in her case and Easy Spanish in mine. I watched the video and thought crikey, if that's easy my Spanish is worse than I thought. Here's the link if you're interested. 

The particular episode talked about things not to do in Spain. Here's the list.

1 Never turn up on time - the example they use in the video is a party. Spaniards do turn up on time for lots of things but the basic notion is good.

2 Never go to the shops between 2 and 5 in the afternoon. Again lots of town centre shops and supermarkets open in the afternoon but the basic premise is good

3 Don't start the "two kisses" (the cheek to cheek lip smacking greeting) from the wrong side. You need to start by moving your head to the left to brush right cheeks; otherwise expect a head butt or a full on the mouth kiss.

4 Don't try to eat in a restaurant outside the "traditional" times. That's probably between say 2 and 4 for lunch and after 8.30 (even that's a bit early) until some unspecified later time for dinner. You can get tapas, sandwiches etc. outside these times but these are the hours when the kitchen will be open. Actually I changed the times a bit because I think they used Catalan times (see point 8).

5 Never clear off as soon as you've finished eating with someone. If you're really in a hurry you can start apologising that you have to go as you drink the after meal coffee. Normally though the after meal chatting is an essential part of the meal

6 Don't read anything into the way you are greeted in a shop or bar. If you are called guapo or guapa for instance (handsome or beautiful) it's simply the same as someone in Liverpool calling you luv or someone in Nottingham thinking you're a duck.

7 Never pronounce an English word as though it were an English word. Every English language word has to be hispanised. This is absolutely true but the rules are incredibly complex about how the word should be tortured.

8 Don't generalise about Spain by which they mean that people from Andalucia have different ways to the people of Cataluña or Galicia. Whilst it's true I often wonder how we'd ever say anything if we weren't able to generalise.

Finally, point 9, don't shoot me. If you don't agree go to the video and make your comments there. I'm just repeating (more or less) what the young women in the video said.

Do you know the one about the Australian who thought that Loughborough was pronounced Loogaboogara?

The English letter O sounds exactly like you just read it. Oh? Oh! The Spanish letter O sounds completely different - a bit more like the O in otter. It's a simple Spanish sound that we Britons often forget. I live in Pinoso. Now read Pinoso again but this time change the O sound to the one from otter. The coronavirus and Covid both have the letter O in them. I tend to use Covid. Think otter again as you say Covid

This word, Covid, is one I learned in Spain. It sounds like the Roman writer Ovid but that only helps if you say Cicero instead of Cicero, or it could be the other way around. Covid is a word I hear on the radio and the TV all the time. So, I'm Skyping to some people in the UK. I say something like "Covid is wreaking havoc with some businesses". The Skypee couple look blank. It was only later that I realised that my pronunciation had, fleetingly, caused confusion.

I was aghast. Someone, somewhere on a forum, on Facebook, in Twitter, (but obviously not on TikTok where I never venture) asked what a TIE was. There has been so much babble about these things in places I look that I thought everyone knew about them. I don't think they thought it was the longish piece of cloth, worn for decorative purposes around the neck, resting under the shirt collar and knotted at the throat. They may well, though, have thought it was pronounced that way, as in "Tie a yellow ribbon around the old oak tree". TIE, for Brits, is one of those with initials, like "The UN", rather than as a word "NATO". Spanish letter sounds are not the same as English letter sounds and in TIE Spaniards roll the letters together. TIE by the way is the foreigner's identity card. It's quite possible that the person asking the question has heard these cards talked about but not recognised the subject because of variations in pronunciation. Say Pinoso with that British O and Spaniards might not recognise the word.

Sometimes it isn't the pronunciation it's the equivalence of ideas embodied in a word. IVA and VAT have different letters but the same meaning, ITV and MOT (the car test) are similar enough to be interchangeable. Sometime the words and ideas are not though. The Spanish Tax system doesn't really have a tax allowance in the same way as the UK does. In practice there are similarities, and it's around 5,500€, but the concept of tax free money isn't the same. There has been a lot of Internet chatter recently about whether another lockdown was likely locally. The word itself embodies an idea which is not really applicable here; the use of a word drawn from one context and applied to another can cause real confusion.  

These language differences aren't the ones that you associate with learning the language. It's why I decided not to ask for the British bacon sandwich the other day in the fast food sandwich shop. I know how to say British bacon perfectly but I'm not confident about how a Spaniard would say it. The easiest thing was to go for the roast chicken with Brie, pollo asado con brie, because I know how to pronounce that.

Juanito Andante and friends

Just thinking about the last blog, about being in Madrid and about going to the pictures. Yesterday we went to see Love, Simon or Con amor, Simon. I pronounced the name Simón in a Spanish sort of way and the woman on the cash desk came back at me with the English pronunciation. I've said in the past that this can be a bit strange at times. Trade names, film titles etc. can have a variety of pronunciations that are neither Spanish, in the usual link between letters and sounds, nor English in the sense that we say a word exactly as we want to.

So, I'm in Madrid, years ago. I've been drinking beer because it's easy to ask for but I want a whisky. I look at the array of bottles behind the bar. White label - odd pronunciation with the silent h and that w and probably labble instead of label - guiyt labble? Bells, double ll, a sort of y sound - Bays? Johnny Walker - odd letters to pronounce both j and w - ghhhonni wallka. And then I spy it, the obvious, the easy - J&B. What can be wrong with that? Me pones un J&B, por favor. Except that J is jota and B is be. And Spaniards don't say and between the letters. What I should have said is something like hota bay.

I got it in the end though and it's still the whisky I drink most often in bars and for the same reason.

A cinema, a parade and something on words

Here are some ramblings from this weekend.

Once upon a time Pizza Express used to serve really good pizzas in interesting buildings. The person who launched the restaurant chain was a chap from Peterborough called Peter Boizot. One of his other ventures in the town was to try to restore the old Odeon Cinema to its former glory as a single screen venue. I've not been to Peterborough for ages but I have this vague recollection that the venture failed. People must prefer multi choice cinemas.

Spain, like everywhere else, has multiplexes in amongst fast food franchises and out of town shopping centres. The big, single screen cinemas are a thing of the past. Youngish people, twenty somethings, I taught in Cartagena still talked nostalgically of the city centre cinemas so it can't be that long ago that they disappeared. Nowadays the old cinemas are gone, boarded up or used as retail outlets.

Years ago, on holiday, I saw my first ever Rus Meyer film in a cinema in central Alicante. On Saturday as I Googled the films from a restaurant table on my phone I was surprised to find that there was a cinema, Cine Navas, just 400 metres away. And, for once, Google maps wasn't fibbing. It was all pretty run down to be honest but it was still pretty impressive, acres and acres of velvet curtains lined the walls and the floor was raked downwards from the screen so that you naturally looked up to the screen. Quite different to the tiered seating of today. The screen was big enough but the image was a bit dull and the soundtrack less than crisp so I wondered if it actually was a real film. The film by the way was terrible - Viaje a Sils Maria or the Clouds of Sils Maria in English I think.

When we came out of the cinema we could hear music. At the top of the road there was a parade. We went for a nosey. Hundreds of people were walking along the street wearing "traditional" clothes. We presumed, and I later confirmed, that it was an early procession as part of the "Bonfires of St John." Nowadays this big Alicante festival is usually given its Valenciano name of Fogueres de Sant Joan rather than its Spanish or Castellano name of Hogueras de San Juan. It marks the Saint's day on the 23rd but it also turns around the shortest night of the year. Huge statues are burned in the street. I like San Juan, it's a very community festival in lots of places with people lighting little fires to cook food, setting off fireworks, jumping over waves to get pregnant etc. San Juan seems also to be a signal. People go and open up their winter long abandoned beach or country house ready for summer.

We'd been in Alicante on Saturday to collect some visitors for one of Maggie's Secret Wine Spain bodega tours and we'd taken advantage of being there which meant spending money. So Sunday was quieter. Very quiet. Too quiet. I polished the car and, as I did so, I listened to a podcast from the radio about the visit of the Beatles to Spain. The Spanish expert on the Beatles explained that their first single Lips Me hadn't been a big hit. I had to listen three or four times to eventually decide that Lips Me was Please Me. The pronunciation and also the mis-titling of Please Please Me didn't help. Later in the programme I was told that the big break for the Beatles was thanks to Harrison Knight. I thought of the people I could remember as being associated with the Beatles - not Brian Epstein, not Mal Evans nor Neil Aspinall nor that American chap because he was an Alan something. Then it struck me. A Hard Day's Night.

This sort of strange pronunciation of English words is very common here. English is fashionable so using an English word in place of a perfectly good Spanish word is rife. There is also a tendency for the English way of saying something to supplant the more usual Spanish form. Lots of English language sounds are very difficult for many Spaniards, hence the mispronunciation. There is a second problem too. If a Spaniard knows how to pronounce an English word correctly it often isn't recognisable to other Spaniards who haven't studied English. So words are intentionally mispronounced to make them intelligible. Sometimes there is a sort of recognised half way house type pronunciation. I can usually guess at common words but names are a real problem - trying to interpret the names of music artists on the radio is by turns a lot of fun and frustrating.