Talking about language

It must be about time for people to be considering their summer holidays and I bet at least some of you are thinking about a Spanish (Castilian) speaking country. Because of my renowned language skills pals often (well maybe two or three in the last fifty years) ask me if I can provide a few key phrases to help them get by.

My advice is to not worry about phrases in the first place but to spend hours going over the pronunciation pages at the beginning of the phrase book. If you can read and pronounce the word Córdoba when you say it to the chap behind the desk at a railway station you will get your tickets without too much difficulty, if its bocadillo in the bar then your sandwich will soon be with you.

I went to get some fags today. I slipped a little and pronounced the cigar brand Dux as ducks, the man looked quizzical, I said it properly the second time, more like doooks and the fags were mine. Spaniards are nowhere near as tolerant of mispronunciation as English speakers. I'm told it's because they are speakers rather then writers but for whatever reason time spent on those vowel and consonant sounds will pay dividends on your holiday. ¡hasta luego!

¿Parlem Valenciá?

¡Parlem Valenciá! Speak the local Valencian language; it's an exhortation seen on plenty of walls in the Valencian Community which includes the province of Alicante where we live.

The language that most people call Spanish is, more accurately, the language of Castile. It's Castilian that is the home language for 20 countries of the World with the largest concentration of Castilian speakers being in the United States of America. Castilian is the third most popular mother tongue in the World after Chinese and Hindhi though English is still miles in front, numberwise, when additional language speakers are taken into account.

There are four main languages in Spain, all of which are Spanish: Galician, Basque, Catalan and Castilian. There are three variants on Catalan - Catalan itself, Mallorquin (from Mallorca and with other variants in the Balearics) and Valencian. Mind you radical Valencians or Mallorcans would argue that their's is a language not a dialect.

During the dictatorship all the local languages were supressed so as soon as the dictatorship crumbled there was a mad dash to reclaim local identity amongst the Catalans and Basques in particular. Now I'm all for that. Roots are a good thing, knowing where you belong and hanging onto the individualism of communities seems very positive. But these things are easy to radicalise and it is now difficult to find a Castilian sign in Cataluña. Whilst the Catalans used to only give grief to their rivals from Madrid over speaking Castilian it's now more acceptable to many Catalans to deal with me, for instance, in English than it is in Castilian.

I mentioned the Pinoso festival of Villazgo a couple of weeks ago. It's a big tourist event bringing people from all over the place. Some of them may even come from the next province along of Murcia (it is only 3kms from Pinoso after all). In Murcia they speak Castilian. But all the publicity for Villazgo was written in Valencian! There was no Castilian version.

Worse still, for government workers throughout Spain there are tests a bit like the UK Civil Service exams. In Valencia part of those tests include being able to read and write in Valencian. This is a problem for lots of Valencian speakers as it is very much a spoken language with significant local grammatical and word variations. Even first langauge Valencian speakers have to cram for their tests. For a teacher, for instance, with qualifications from Madrid or Toledo or Seville they have to pass the Valencian language test before they can work here.

It seems, to me, utterly ridiculous to abandon a language of World status for a local language spoken by a thousands rather than millions of people and then to make it a requirement for professionals to have language skills that are nothing to do with their jobs.

A blow for the common man

You may remember that I got a bit tetchy with the people who run the website for the Town Hall in Petrer (see Giving Blood, October 2006). I suggested that they might have time to put some dates and details on their events calendar if they spent a bit less time in the bar.

I had a look at their website today for the first time in ages. They've put the dates against all this years events, done a little spiel about them and, where they have the timetable, they've put that in too. I sent them a little note to say what a good job it was.

Villazgo

As there is a post in the February 2006 archive about Villazgo, the festival in Pinoso that celebrates the "divorce" from Monóvar, I won't go into too much detail this time.

We went, along with a couple of friends, to this year's event. We saw the various stalls celebrating the traditions and customs of the area and we had a lot of fun eating our way through local speciality food and drinking our way through local wine.

The dancers are dancing a Jota, the other photo shows the Neighbourhood Association from Culebrón. They were there to fly the flag for our particular village.

Moors and Christians

There have been other posts on this blog about Moors and Christians so, just to say, that the season has started again with Sax's festival from 1 to 5 February. We had visitors with us who were interested in seeing the procession on Saturday despite the torrential rain.

I was very impressed that, whilst we sheltered under the overhang of a block of flats, the participants just got on with it and splashed their way from puddle to puddle. I could understand why the Comparsa whose uniform was a long frock coat and a "Capn. Hornblower" hat, complete with feather, chose to wrap matching plastic bags around their hats.

A smaller miracle

Our new tumble dryer packed in. I rang the shop and they said an engineer would be with us a couple of days later. Fine I thought. An hour later an engineer called me on my mobile phone. He was only about ten minutes from our house, could he pop round now to save him the journey on Wednesay? He replaced the duff thermostat and was away - job done - within two hours of the original call.

A miracle

You will find several posts about the damage inflicted on my, once beautiful, 1978 MGB GT by one Jesús Berenguer and his Audi.

The car still hasn't been repaired, and it probably never will be, but its technical inspection, the ITV (equivalent to the MOT in the UK) became due a couple of days ago. I couldn't take it in on time because I had taken the car to a garage to see if they thought it could get through the ITV. They reckoned with a new headlight to replace the cracked one and a bit of persuasion to the bodywork to get the headlamp angle right, the car might go through the test. It took them just 14 days to replace the headlamp! They were worried that the exhaust emisions might be too high for it to pass but they said repalcing the floats, or doing anything, to the SU carbs was beyond their technical know how. They did nothing else. Rapid service eh?

So, with nothing to lose except the 40€ test fee I took the car in for it's ITV today. I nearly turned around on the journey, I expected my old friend to be humiliated. I wondered if the staff would laugh openly at me. The car was popping and banging, running like a bag of nails. It was filthy, it has paint flaking off all over the place and, of course, it's dented.

But it sailed through the test. Emissions, lights, brakes, steering all good. I was truly amazed.

Does the King have it in for me?

The Spanish King is Juan Carlos I. I thought he semed like a decent enough chap but I'm beginning to have my doubts.

All laws passed in Spain are published as Royal Decrees. You may remember that, when I asked my bank why they had overcharged me, they replied that they couldn't tell me because Royal Decree such and such stopped them sending an answer without me first proving that I was, in fact, me.

I've been turned down a couple of times when I have tried to give blood beause I come from a country with Mad Cow disease. Feeling this was a little unjust I have written a couple of emails to people asking for a little more explanation. Nobody has ever repiled. But I heard about a group called the Spanish Federation of Blood Donors and I wrote to them. Their reply came back within 24 hours. It said "Unfortunately Royal Decree 1088/2005 of 16 September, establishes, for all Spain, an exclusion on donations from persons who resided within the UK for more than 12 months at any time in the period 1980-1996."

The King had a reputation, when he was a bit younger, for mixing with the common folk, giving lifts to hitch hikers on his motorbike, having a coffee in his local bar etc. The next time I bump into him I'm going to have a few words about the way he's picking on me.

A couple of exhibitions

A couple of weeks ago Maggie and I went to see a travelling exhibition about Spanish portrtait painting. The show had been organised by the Prado Museum in Madrid, but was on at MUBAG, the Fine Arts Museum just down the road in Alicante. I thought it was really good. 62 pictures, 32 artists including el Greco, Velázquez, Murillo and Goya with a well organised theme and good labelling of the various periods and paintings. It was sponsored by a local bank called the CAM.

The CAM also runs a small museum dedicated to the writer Azorín. I mentioned it in a blog from October of last year. I went to see a show there this weekend called Azorín; Journeys Lived and Told. I thought from the blurb that it was about Azorín going to Paris, Albacete, Castilla la Mancha and New York. In fact, and I think this only because I've gone through the website and catalogue about the show with a dictionary, that it is actually a bunch of photos taken by a photographer called Eva Guillamón in those places. I couldn't work that out whilst I was at he exhibition. I also think that Azorín never actually made it to New York! The photos were generally out of focus and poorly framed, the example here is much better than most. I thought the link was tenuous and the exhibition was amongst the worst that I have ever seen.

Vías Pecuarias

The track that goes past the bottom of our house has a little sign on it that says Vía Pecuaria. It means Drover's Path.

Last week I saw an article in our local rag about conserving these Drover's Paths. It seems to me that they are a bit like the public footpaths or the green lanes in the UK. Just like in the UK some people want to see them remain as open access, public spaces and others want to fence them off, build on them etc.

Their original purpose was to link the summer pastures in the mountains with winter pastures in the valleys for the movement of animals. In order to ensure that there weren't conflicts between the nomadic herders and more settled farmers these paths have been governed by a whole range of rules and regs from the Middle Ages onwards. The rules defined the characteristics of overnight resting places, widths of the tracks etc. It's these ancient rights that still protect these paths as public spaces. Apparently, at their height, there were over 125,000kms of tracks in Spain, nearly 1% of the total landspace. That compares with just 15,000km of railway lines.

The track past our house is only a couple of metres wide but some are much wider. In fact there is a classification system defined by width. The Royal Droves have to be at least 75 metres wide to qualify for the title. You could build quite a few houses on a track 75 metres wide!

Port Saplaya

We went to see our pals who live in Bétera near Valencia again this weekend. Apart from a trip to the mountains and into Valencia city we went to a seaside town called Port Saplaya. There's a big housing development there where each block of flats and each house is designed to be different to the rest. The idea was to build something unique and with the same watery feel as Venice.

It looks quite good. Unfortunately the designers forgot that there's not much of a tide on the Med; certainly not enough to swill the water around inside the development. Like Venice it got a tad smelly in summer. There are now huge pumps to slosh the water around a bit when necessary.