Support for corvidae

The music festival season is just beginning to warm up in Spain. We usually try to get along to at least one event. It's good to hear a band that goes on to greater things - "Calvin? great musician! First time I saw him he was on the tiny fourth stage just by the latrines at half past six in the evening" It's good to hear new bands in general and I always look forward to those vegetable noodles they serve in the overpriced food areas too.

So I was reading an article, in Spanish, from a national newspaper. It was suggesting ways to keep the costs of festival going to a bare minimum. It suggested coachsurfing (sic). Fortunately for me coachsurfing was hyperlinked and when I followed the link there was a little piece about couchsurfing (sic). Taken along with the rest of the article about how nice someone had been to some tourists I decided that it was about an internet method of finding a floor to kip on. Someone who would put you up on their couch for a fraction of the price of the cheapest hostel. I have no idea whether couchsurfing is in use in the UK but there is a fair chance that it is - it's just new to me. I may know what wotless and glamping mean but it's imppossible to keep up with all the linguistic changes from a couple of thousand kilometres away.

Back in our living room I was watching some late night current affairs programme. The subtitles were on. They repeatededly mentioned crowfunding (sic) which is a fair phonetic interpretation of the word the people were using during the debate. I guessed straight away that it was not some crow support charity but a mispronunciation of crowd funding. Similar things happen all the time. I'm never quite sure whether the word is basically an Englishism given a Spanish twist - like WhatsApp becoming wassap or whether some Spanish person has decided that an English word or phrase will do the job better than a Spanish word and invented something that only exists here. Not to stray too far a really simple example of the latter would be the word parking, which is a well established and widely used Spanish word, that translates as car park or parking lot.

English words crop up in the middle of educated Spanish speech all the time. Today, in maybe an hour or so of radio listening, I noticed base camp, hotspot and peacekeeper. Often the words are pronounced to Spanish pronunciation rules so that they become unintelligible to my Brit ear. It's quite strange to maybe hear a new phrase or word on the radio or TV only to realise, when I see it written down, that it is some perfectly simple English word. Change the stress, as my students do, on ear to make it sound like a West Country exclamation and you'll appreciate how easily and quickly it can happen.

At least I've worked out a strategy for one thing that used to flummox me all the time. I get to the cinema and the title is in English. I often tried, unsuccessfully, to guess the Spanish pronunciation. Now I just say the title in English and follow it up with a Spanish phrase which says "I hate it when the titles are in English." We all have a bit of a laugh and the success rate on trouble free ticket buying has skyrocketed.

I must be in Paris

I used to use an English language exercise about the difference between must and could. You know the sort of thing; she must be delayed: she could be ill, she could be in traffic. The example went something like " I can see the Eiffel Tower, I can see the River Seine - where am I?" I learned to write the words on the board because my pronunciation never clicked with my Spanish students but it didn't help much. The success rate on "You must be in Paris." was pretty low. Maybe 50% would get the French capital with Rome coming a close second. Another exercise had pictures of the Christ statue in Rio, the Opera House in Sydney, The Coliseum in Rome and The Capitol Building in Washington DC. Hardly anyone could identify anything other than the Coliseum.

Now not recognising Sydney Opera House is no sort of crime; no measure of intelligence. I'm dead against lots of rote learning and there is no reason that anyone should know a series of landmarks but I would have hoped that a bunch of young people would maybe have done just a little better. Most of the students for the particular course were mid 20s university students doing Master's degrees after all.

There are lots of American series on Spanish TV. Programmes like The Mentalist, Bones, Big Bang Theory, Modern Family, Two Broke Girls etc. Nowadays we normally watch these programmes in English with the Spanish subtitles on just to give the impression that we live in Spain. Where the subtitles make some reference to something colloquially American - Betsy Ross sewing the flag, tater tots, doughboy marshmallows, Fox News etc. - the subtitles often gently subvert that into a Spanish reference. So Lifesavers become Chupa Chups and Russell Westbrook becomes Marc Gasol. Some "black" US delicacy in Blackish last night was translated into ham and tortilla by the subs.

I sometimes don't get the US references myself. It's a foreign country after all, and my faculties are going, but I can usually work out the basic idea. I can also see a justification at times - for instance where the reference is language based as in the example of tater tots - which were simply translated as crisps. On the other hand such a narrow, parochial view of the world where everything is referenced to Spain seems basically unhealthy to me. It could be one of the reasons those students don't know that the Eiffel Tower is in Paris.

Crowding round the telly

I still watch TV more or less as I did in the 1960s. Not that I stare avidly at Zip Nolan or Mike Nelson in Sea Hunt but I do generally, watch broadcast television at the time that it is broadcast. Every now and then I will use the streaming feeds from a TV company for the missed episode and I have even been known to steal television programmes from one of the torrent sites. I don't really understand torrents though and I am usually mightily disappointed when after downloading something for hours or days the picture keeps macroblocking.

I begged a cup off coffee of some pals yesterday. They told me that Sky, or whoever it is that uses whichever satellites to send out whatever British satellite TV signals, has just shifted everything around again. They do this from time to time presumably for technical reasons, possibly to add quality or functionality, and maybe to deny the signal to we expats. It certainly sends ripples through the Brit population who have parabolic dishes the size of the the Parkes Radio Telescope in their back gardens. We've got one.

My usual fare is broadcast digital terrestrial Spanish TV. We have slightly more channels in Culebrón than down in Murcia but in both places I think it's around 40 TV channels plus a bunch of radio stations. I have, occasionally considered one of the TV packages offered by the various Internet providers but, in the end, the price always puts me off.

Although I'm still vaguely trying to improve my Spanish I long ago abandoned watching English language programmes in Spanish as the dubbing is risible. The actors, who are often quite famous here, use less emotion than the speaking clock and children are interpreted by adults making a squeaking sound reminiscent of piglets. The digital TV signal usually allows me to change the language to the original language, when that isn't Spanish, so I don't have to put up with the hideous dubbing.

Anyway, after my conversation about the changes to the availability of British TV I switched on the Sky box to see what channels were still working. All the ones I was looking for were still there. It was the first time I'd watched British TV for ages. Our Sky box is an ancient thing, just a decoder. Neither it nor the telly have a hard disc so there is none of the potential to record programmes or to stop a TV programme whilst you make a cup of tea. Even in the brief period I watched there were adverts for TV series on demand and lots of interactive services. I don't know much about the varieties of technological wizardry available to modern TV viewers but it did make me wonder about the sophistication of Spanish viewing habits as against British ones.

I occasionally discuss TV with my students. Most of them don't really watch TV, they watch TV programmes on their computers. Very few seem to hook up the computer to the bigger TV screen and nobody has ever described watching TV via boxes which integrate broadcast TV, Internet catch up services or direct Internet TV though I believe those sort of things are common in the UK. They must be available here but, maybe, Spaniards have a better plan for their spare time spurred on by all those open air cafés and the milder climate.

Diversity

I occasionally see British TV and it is full of people who don't have "Anglo" names. Presumably their families went to the UK from all around the world. They are just there - no fuss, nothing different - getting on with their jobs as reporters, soap actors, presenters and the like. It's so normal, so routine that it's completely unexceptional.

Back home in Pinoso I was reading through the list of entrants and prizewinners in a competition to design a poster for some event a while ago. I was half looking for a British name. The last time I saw any information there were 42 nationalities represented in Pinoso yet, amongst the names of the entrants there was not a single one that didn't have a double barrelled Spanish surname. I may be wrong but I've never noticed anyone in the Carnival Queen competition who isn't Spanish either and whilst I have seen the odd Brit amongst the dance troupes and choirs I haven't noticed Algerians or Senegalese doing anything similar.

I didn't bother to Google my figures and the numbers will have dropped recently but there were something like six million foreign born residents in Spain from a population of some forty seven million. We EU Europeans have a right to live here but lots of nationalities like Ecuadorian, Moroccans, Ukrainians and Chinese have to become nationalised if they wish to remain in Spain. So there are lots of people here with their family roots in other countries who are now full blown Spanish nationals. Lots of them must be well into second or maybe third generation by now.

I don't watch much Spanish TV, the home-grown product that is as distinct from US imports so I am not a reliable source. However, I can only think of two regular TV faces who aren't Spanish. One of them is Michael Robinson the ex Liverpool and QPR footballer who is a football commentator and pundit and, until very recently, there was a young Korean woman called Usun Yoon on a satirical current affairs programme called el Intermedio. There are almost certainly others but I don't know them. Obviously there are all shapes and sizes of people on TV all the time because Spain buys programming from all around the world and because there are celebs and sports stars doing what they do as well as turning up in the adverts. Nonetheless the nationally produced stuff seems remarkably monolithic.

I was at a music festival over the weekend and I was talking about this phenomenon to Maggie. I realised that there were very few black people, Latin Americans etc. among the crowd or even among the musicians.

Maybe it just needs a few more years.