"Spanish": A Rant

O.k., here is a rant I've been repressing since the fall of 1958, when I first landed on these shores.

It has to do with what Americans mean when they say that someone is "Spanish."  It used to be that when people would tell me "Oh, I used to know a Spanish boy in high school," I would ask what part of Spain he was from.  And invariably it turned out that the person was Cuban, Mexican, Dominican, Nicaraguan, Honduran, Panamanian, Venezuelan, Colombian, Ecuadorian, Bolivian, Paraguayan, Uruguayan, Chilean or Argentinian.  But never, not once, was he Spanish.  He spoke Spanish, or some version of it, but he was no more Spanish than someone from Kansas is English.

Now, when I'm told that someone is Spanish, I just nod.  It's highly unlikely that the person is from Spain--after all, there are only forty million of us, as opposed to some five hundred million Spanish speakers south of the Rio Grande.  Spanish people come from across the Atlantic.  We are Europeans, and though we share certain cultural and linguistic features with Latin Americans, we are as different from them as a Californian is from a Yorkshireman.  Not better, not worse--just different.

Latin Americans in the U.S.  have introduced the word  "Latino," which is short for latinoamericano, to describe their origins.  Of course "Latino," absent the americano part, is also inaccurate, since it necessarily includes people from Spain and Portugal, who were conquered by the Romans before they, in turn, conquered the New World.  But I've quibbled enough.

And here is a sub-rant, about the Castilian and Catalan languages, which are often confused.  Until the fifteenth century, Spain consisted of a number of separate kingdoms, each of which had its own language.  Then Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile married, subjugated all the kingdoms, and imposed Castilian as the official language of the new country. So what is generally called "Spanish" is actually the tongue originally spoken in the central region of Spain.

But the other regional languages--Aranese, Basque, Galician, Aragonese, Asturian, Leonese, Cantabrian, Extremaduran, Eonavian, Fala, Riffian, Calo and my own native tongue, Catalan--are alive to this day, despite centuries-old efforts at suppression by the central government.  With the exception of Basque, whose origins nobody has figured out, they are all Romance languages and not dialects of Castilian, but languages in their own right, just as French, Italian and Portuguese are.

And finally, a sub-sub-rant, about the supposed "lisp" of Castilian speakers which, according to a legend popular with Americans, originated with a Spanish monarch's speech defect.  Castilian speakers are perfectly able to pronounce the "s" sound--but they associate it exclusively with the letter "s."  They pronounce "Susana" not as "Thuthana," but the way you would.

However, the letter "c" when it precedes "e" or "i," and the letter "z" are pronounced "th." Thus Castilian speakers pronounce zumba (which means "he, she, or it buzzes") "thumba."  In Latin America and in the south of Spain it's pronounced "sumba."

That said, there are Castilian speakers who are afflicted with a genuine lisp.  How can you tell?  They are the ones who say "Thuthana."

I would like to end on a humble note:  I know perfectly well that one's sensitivity to regional and linguistic distinctions is dictated by culture and identity.  My mother teased my father because he spoke Catalan with an accent from Barcelona, whereas she spoke with an accent from Lleida, 100 miles to the west.  As a result, I am exquisitely aware of the contrast between those two ways of speaking.  But I cannot distinguish between an Australian and a New Zealand accent, or even a Queens and a Brooklyn accent.  And as for the origin of the differences between Sunnis and Shiites...I'll tell you in a minute, after I check on Google.

But I'm glad I got the Spanish and the lisp bits off my chest.

Endangered Tenses

You've all got me thinking about the shrinking use of verb tenses in this day and age. If language reflects how we think and who we are, Western civilization is going to hell in a handbasket.

French long ago retired the preterite indicative and the preterite perfect (the passe simple and the passe anterieur, as we learned in Intermediate French) to literary use, replacing both with the present perfect, or passe compose, for real-life purposes. Spanish, I am glad to report, still hangs on to the significant distinction between the preterite (indicating actions that were completed in the past) and the present perfect (indicating actions that have just been completed). Those nemeses of anglophones, the imperfect and the pluperfect (indicating actions begun in the past but still ongoing) seem to be holding their own in Romance languages, for the time being.

But in English, quelle horreur! In a language that already has a pared-down verb system (no distinction between preterite and imperfect), people these days can't even seem to be able to deal with the past perfect, the tense that allows you to specify that a certain action preceded another action in the past. Thus routinely you hear “if I knew you were coming, I would have baked a cake” as opposed to “if I had known you were coming, I would have baked a cake.” The knowing preceded the coming, and it would be nice to have it expressed accurately. How hard is that?

The situation is especially grave regarding the subjunctive. In her comment on my last post, Elizabeth mentions someone who has established a Society to Save the Subjunctive. Would that it could! The subjunctive is not a tense, but a mood with its own tenses. In contrast to the indicative—the mood of factual reality—or the imperative—the mood of command—the subjunctive expresses longing, desire, wishful thinking as opposed to what actually is, e.g., if I were rich, you would love me; or, may you rot in hell for putting your mat on my spot in yoga class.

Why are we losing the subjunctive? Is it because wealth and technology have erased the gap between wanting and having? Is it because of a more subtle philosophical shift, Kant dressed up in New Age lycra, that posits that subjectivity constitutes the only valid reality? Either way, there is cause for alarm, and the only solution I can see is to bring the subjunctive back in hopes that, if we speak well, we will think well.

If you were to have a happy Thanksgiving, I would be delighted.