MY WORD! – False Cognates and Other Slips of the Second-Language Tongue

Some 20 years ago, back when I was still trying to boost my Spanish from beginner’s level to intermediate, I got a priceless lesson on what are called false cognates—words that sound like they’d mean the same thing in different languages…but, sometimes tragically, don’t.

I was attending a big wedding reception in La Trinidad, a tiny village just outside of Puebla, Mexico. Sitting at the dining room table in the home of the bride’s parents, along with other members of the family, I needed a break and asked where to find the baño. Following the directions upstairs, I found myself in a small foyer surrounded by several rooms, each separated from the hall by a thick curtain.

For no particular reason I picked door number two and swept open the curtain. The young woman sitting on the toilet five feet in front of me scrambled to cover herself with a handful of toilet paper, but the damage was done. Backing gingerly away, I blurted some form of “Oops!” and waited nervously across the hall.

When she emerged, I clasped both hands to my heart and said earnestly: ¡Estoy tan embarasado! She seemed to accept my apology graciously, which must have been hard for her, since—as I later found out—I'd just managed to forget about one of the most notorious English-to-Spanish false cognates, and exclaimed “I’m so very pregnant!”

You can bet I learned the real word for “embarrassed,” (It’s avergonzado) and it has stayed learned. There are quite a few other potential slip-ups in Spanish; let’s hope I’ve learned them the easy way.

TURNABOUT IS FAIR PLAY
I recently asked my dear friend and one-time Spanish teacher, Silverio, who moved from Mexico City to Minneapolis about 25 years ago speaking very little English, what some of his most memorable gaffes have been. He recalled many, but these two stand out:

Having dinner with some co-workers, Silverio noticed that the guy across from him had a bit of French fry stuck just above his right eyebrow. Since the Spanish word for that part of one’s face—frente—wasn’t going to work with these all-American boys, he wracked his brain for the right term in English.

Let’s see…fore-…something or other. Oh yeah, got it. Pointing at the spot on his own face, Silverio shouted across the table, “Hey Larry, you’ve got something on your foreskin.”

Silverio, like me with my “pregnancy,” learned that vocabulary word the hard way. (And he’s still avergonzado to this day.)

One day at work he was on the phone with an important prospective customer. When the woman asked him how many people would be assigned to her account, Silverio knew he’d have to discuss the matter with his boss. But his nascent grasp of English word order turned his intended promise into a threat:
“I’ll get you back.”


THE PINEAPPLE OF POLITENESS
I can’t address false cognates without thinking of their cousins, malapropisms.* Malapropisms are words—in your own, first language—that don’t quite sound the same as the word you’re grasping for, but are close enough to be funny—and might even slip by unnoticed. Unlike false cognates, there’s no translation involved; you just blurt out the wrong word. Like this classic, from Mrs Malaprop herself: “He is the very pineapple of politeness!” Or this one from Aunt Sally in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer: “I was most putrified with astonishment.”

What are some of your—or others’—funniest or most mortifying slips of the tongue? We’d love to hear from you!

* The term “malapropism” comes from a character called Mrs. Malaprop, from The Rivals, a 1775 five-act comedy by Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Mrs. Malaprop did, in fact, use words incorrectly as a funny quirk of her character. Her name became the default term for misusing a word. Her name, in turn, comes from the French mal à propos, or “inappropriate.”

MAS QUE SALTA A LA VISTA – The Sounds of Zihuatanejo

Beautiful Zihuatanejo, this enchanting Pacific Coast town in the Mexican state of Guerrero, inspires a rush of sensory impressions. What always hits me first are the visual ones, the colors, patterns, forms and textures of a place that’s not afraid to flaunt them all.

I’ve often likened these visual excitements to a feast for a starving man, and this year, having just escaped a monochromatic, snowier-than-usual Minnesota winter for a while, I’m snarfing down the sights even more eagerly than usual.

       Their embellishment—the weft, if you
       will—is an array of softer, more colorful
       and richly textured fibers.

HEARD AND NOT SEEN
But we possess, after all, five senses. I derive great pleasure from exploring them all. So let me feature another with some praise for the winsome sounds of this place.

Many are those one might hear in any developed-world town: the chatter of people’s comings and goings, the clack and clang of light industry, the hum of traffic. Sounds I don’t consider especially pleasant.

But that’s where the sound tapestry of Zihuatanejo takes a turn to the exotic. If the warp of the cloth, its strength, is those workaday strands of noise, their embellishment—the weft, if you will—is an extraordinary array of softer, more colorful and richly textured fibers.

 

The soft breath of the Pacific surf; the shy coos of Inca doves; the haunting little flute ditty of the itinerant knife sharpener; strains of ranchero music animating the work of painters and carpenters.

 

There’s also the laughter of kids splashing in the surf along Playa La Ropa; the traditional música costeña of strolling musicians; the “Peta, Peta, Peta” call of the young attendant hanging out the door of the rickety bus to Petatlan.



And the rustle of palm fronds; the barely perceptible whirr of a ceiling fan; and the bird-like chirps of geckos as they stalk bugs on the ceiling.

        Even the Spanish word for German makes
        the German word for it sound severe.

DEUTSCH IT’S NOT
And then, of course, there’s the language.

My family roots are German. Naturally, offered the choice of just French or German in high school, I took German. I’m sure that made my parents and perhaps the spirits of a few long-gone ancestors very happy.

But in my mid-50s I decided I’d been a Mexican fisherman in a previous life, and that “Ich bin ein Fischer” just wouldn’t sound right coming out of that character’s mouth. So I took up Spanish, and have become, if not a great fisherman, a passable hispanohablante.

Spanish, with its softer, romance-language color and lilt, is another of those weft strands that make the tapestry of sound here in Zihuatenejo so rich and vibrant. I mean even the Spanish word for German—aleman—makes the German word for it—deutsch—sound severe.

So, while I still think of Zihuatanejo’s visual blessings as good enough to eat, I think I’ll digest them wrapped in the fine serape of its audible ones.

WALKING THE TALK – How Learning Spanish Has Become My Ticket to Adventure

They say one of the best ways to stay sharp as one ages is to learn a new language. Great. But they also say that the best time to learn that new language is when one is about three years old.
Perfect! It’s the best of both worlds for me; I’m a senior citizen who, I’m told, often acts like a three-year-old.

                                                   ~   //  ~  //  ~

My roots are a typical American melting-pot amalgam: a little English, a bit of Italian…but mostly German. My family celebrates that heritage in a well-documented trove of family lore and with a few fine decorative and artistic German heirlooms handed down through the generations.

So, naturally, when I faced the choice of either French or German as my foreign language in high school, I went with the deutsch. Never gave it a second thought.

     None of it fit my romantic image of myself 
     as a Mexican fisherman in a previous life.

AN EPIPHANY
Flash forward to about 2002. It was then, at the age of 57, during one of my several identity crises, that I decided I hated German. Truth be told, I’d never liked the hard, guttural sound of it. I didn’t much care for some of the national characteristics it conjured up for me either. None of it fit my romantic image of myself as a Mexican fisherman in a previous life.

Besides, it was becoming quite clear that I might never even visit Germany. But I had been traveling to Mexico, with my parents when I was nine, and a couple of times with friends as an adult. Then I got married, and Sally and I continued the trend, spring-breaking in nearly all of the popular Mexican beach towns.

I think it was Mazatlán where the epiphany happened. As I usually do, I’d boned up on a few basic pleasantries in Spanish so I could be a more gracious visitor, a better representative of my own country.

But on this one short cab ride, when it came time to pay the fare, the limit of my competence in the language came up and bit me. For some reason, cien (a hundred) and diez (ten) switched places in my brain, and I was convinced the driver had stiffed me.

He explained with patience I didn’t deserve. Red-faced, I apologized and handed him the pesos…and a little extra for the painful lesson. And it was at that precise moment that the trajectory of my late-in-life quest for Spanish literacy took off.

IMMERSION IS THE KEY
Next time in Mexico, I decided, I’ll be able to carry on at least a simple “How’re the wife and kids?” conversation with a cab driver—and be able to correctly count my change. Those were my goals.

So I signed up for a St. Paul Public Schools Community Ed. class: Spanish for Beginners. My teacher was Silverio Rios, an engaging 40-something Mexican who’d been living and working in the Twin Cities for several years.

One evening after class I asked Silverio to join me for coffee and we chatted a bit about my goals for learning his first language. Toward the end of that first get-together, he told me of his plans to take small groups of his students on week-long Spanish immersion trips down to the part of central Mexico where he’d grown up.

That idea captivated me, and, as I was then a graphic designer, I offered to design and write his brochure for him. He accepted, offering in exchange a spot on his inaugural trip.

And so, Voces del Español was born. In August 2003, Silverio, I and three other students flew to Mexico City, then bussed to Querétaro City, and finally rented a car for the drive to the charming little town of Tequisquiápan, which would serve as our home base for the week.

The format involved formal classes in the mornings and an excursion each afternoon. Silverio had designed all the activities to encourage our use of the language in everyday experiences, such as buying produce from the local market or ordering dinner at a restaurant for everyone in our group.

Also included in those experiences was joining Silverio’s relatives for typical family events like a birthday, a wedding and going to the cemetery to tend to family graves. On different occasions we helped make bread with his mom and joined in the elaborate preparation of a mole.

WHERE LA ACCION IS
By the end of that first Voces trip, I realized my original goal of engaging in small-talk with a cab driver had already been eclipsed. Now I knew I was capable of more.

My Spanish learning was to become the theme—the key, one could say—to many more travels in Latin America. I eventually went on three more Voces immersion trips with Silverio. With each one, I gained more tools and more confidence in expressing myself. (Not to mention the great joy of being virtually adopted into his family.)

I’ve also travelled to Spain, Peru and Argentina, and attended language schools in Veracruz, Mexico, Panama and Cuba. All, if not dictated by my quest for better Spanish, at least encouraged by it.

      My goal had been edging up too, like one
      of those mechanical rabbits that racing dogs
      chase, always just beyond reach.

NOT LOST IN TRANSLATION
One measure of my progress has been the time lapse between when I think of something to say and when the words actually come out of my mouth. I remember quite clearly when that interval was five to ten seconds. In most of my attempts to join a conversation I was getting left behind.

But my competence level kept edging up, and that time interval down. At some point I realized my goal had been edging up too, like one of those mechanical rabbits that racing dogs chase, always just beyond reach. Now I wasn’t going to settle for any less than holding my own in those conversations with native speakers.

I have my moments—occasionally glorified by a couple of tequilas. They’ve included many conversations with Silverio, members of his family or Spanish-speaking friends I’ve met on my own, about a range of topics from art to zoology.

Once I get going, I enter that rarified air where only the relatively fluent survive. Where my mind goes right from hearing the Spanish to replying in Spanish, without passing through an English translation.

I suppose it’s another measure of my progress that I’m now less focused on vocabulary and grammar than on the finer points, like minimizing my English accent and incorporating common filler words—the Spanish equivalents to the English “um,” “well,” “then” or “so”— into my speaking.

Yes, I’ve a ways to go, but I can definitely see the prize. It may be that I’ll never be able to actually grab it; that might take a few months living in a place where no one speaks English. Maybe in my next life.

EMPOWERMENT
It’s amazing, when traveling, what knowing the local language does for a person. For me, it’s been kind of like watching and envying a competent musician, and then, with a ton of work, being able to play myself.

My new second language opens doors—to friendships, to avoiding conflict, to finding my way around. And for Sally, it cuts through the awkwardness of her having to shop using just hand gestures.

I can even feel my Spanish competence affecting my posture as I walk down the street, especially in areas where I may be the only person in that town who looks like me. I enjoy seeing the look on a person’s face when someone who looks so unlikely to be a Spanish speaker handles their language so capably.

More than once, that person has explained that they’d expected me, at best, to speak English with a heavy German accent.
                                                     ~   //  ~  //  ~

POSTSCRIPT: My dad, at about the same age I was when my love affair with Spanish began, was also dreaming of learning the language. He chipped away at it, but with all his home and business responsibilities he never really got past the basics. I know that a great part of my motivation has been to honor his dream and make him proud. I believe I have.

OFF TO CUBA...Stay Tuned...

(You can find some of my Cuba posts on my travel blog, El Viajero Contento.)

For the next couple of weeks I’ll likely be incommunicado here and on my travel blog, El Viajero Contento. Not because I’m nobly foreswearing all distractions digital, but because they’re being foresworn for me. I’m going to Cuba.

PHOTO: Agencia Braxil via WikiMedia Commons

Besides the assumption that access to the Internet will be all but impossible, I’m hoping to be so busy—between several hours every day of Spanish lessons, group excursions around and beyond Havana, lots of good music, food and rum, and a few adventures on my own—that I won’t have much time to post.

But I will keep a journal and take lots of photos, which I can later edit down to manageable installments and share on my blogs and Facebook.

It should be a real adventure, a solo trip to this enigmatic little country—so near (just 90 miles from the US), yet so far away for its half-century of near isolation from its anti-social northern neighbor. Besides taking another small step toward Spanish fluency, I hope to see some of city and countryside, meet some interesting people and find a unique reporting angle on the experience.

PHOTO: Pixabay

The state of the arts in Cuba / Signs of US influence that’s managed to filter into the country through visitors from other parts of the world / Where is the line to be found between “old Cuba” and the inevitable new Cuba to come? / How to experience Cuba on $80 a day. These are just a few of the themes I’m considering. I suspect others will reveal themselves as I jostle and jot around La Habana.

So please think of me; wish me a good ear for the particularities of Cuban Spanish; and pray for no more western Atlantic or Caribbean hurricanes this season. And please keep an eye here and on El Viajero Contento for a series of trip reports when I return.

Gracias y saludos…

PHOTO: Pixabay

“Cuban eyes often look close to tears. Tears never seem far away because both their pain and their joy are always so close to the surface.”
BRIN-JONATHAN BUTLER – The Domino Diaries: My Decade Boxing with Olympic Champions and Chasing Hemingway's Ghost in the Last Days of Castro's Cuba

THE PRICE OF PARADISE

I sit in my dimly-lit hillside villa, overlooking Zihuatanejo Bay. A thin sprinkling of lights suggests the water's outline, the black void itself punctuated by just a row of swaying white anchor lights atop the masts of sailboats moored just off the beach. Beyond them, nothing but the Pacific some 8,000 miles to New Zealand.

Our living room has only three walls; the fourth, seaside, was never built, never needed in this mild-to-hot, two-season climate. Instead, a planter of pink bougainvillea spans the room, integrated with the formed-concrete structure as if it had all come out of the same mold.

So the delicious Pacific air, calmed from this afternoon's rambunctiousness, wafts in, as does the agreeable sound of live Santana covers from the beach down the hill and two blocks away. Still, every twelve or thirteen seconds the surf, like some insistent old lady, tries to hush the band.

   Occasionally, a sound makes me stop what 
   I'm doing and reminds me that this is Mexico.

CHARROS AND CHACHALACAS
Our end of Zihuatanejo—the La Ropa neighborhood—is usually pretty quiet. Its only arterial road passes the front entrance of our little cluster of rented villas, but traffic noise just kind of blends into the soundtrack of life—birds, people chatting, some construction activity down the street, and, always, the surf.

Occasionally, though, a sound makes me stop what I'm doing and reminds me that this is Mexico: ranchero music blaring out of some guy's truck; the hypnotically simple flute melody advertising the itinerant knife-sharpener with his foot-powered grinding wheel; and, just this morning, the commanding squawk of a few onomatopoeically-named chachalacas, a nearly pheasant-sized bird we're hearing in our part of town for the first time this year.

Sometimes, it's smells: the haze of wood smoke from brush fires in the surrounding countryside; the fresh, clean scent of the cleaning solution they mop our floors with every day; the floury, flowery aroma of fresh tortillas.

As I write, no fewer than five geckos cling to my white stucco ceiling, waiting for the unsuspecting bug to fly in. (Last year, we witnessed the epic stalk, strike and swallow when one took down a moth nearly half its size.) Now four of them are exchanging words in the corner of the kitchen. They sound like birds—raspy-voiced ones like grackles.

SHADES OF SERENITY
I'm tired. Sally and I walk the couple of miles into town every day—and back. There are a few long ups and downs along the way, as well as a couple where a similar ascent is concentrated into a much shorter run. Sometimes, we do the walk twice.

And the sun is powerful and pervasive. Even if you're not standing in its full, straight-down blast—the kind Richard Dreyfus experienced at that railroad crossing in Close Encounters—you feel it circumventing the shade of your visor, radiating up off the ground and every other surface all around you. We know now why many Mexicans still honor the tradition of the siesta.

While those who know better nap, we walk. We've learned the fine art of pacing ourselves, taking just a few blocks at a time and then resting a few minutes. We've discovered the choicest spots of shade along the route—several of them doubly blessed with not just shade but zephyrs of bay breeze captured and concentrated by favorably-oriented building walls.

It's not just this soft, moist air; this whole place is delicious. I've written many times about the colors, comparing them with rich, savory, spicy food. The pace of life is unhurried, not just for the locals, who know there's no point in stressing out over things generally beyond their control, but for us visitors, who relish their example.

I dream of gabbing away with a Mexican family in a real, unmitigated conversation over dinner or a game of Conquian or dominó.

TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT
There's always a sense of adventure here in "Zihua," at least for those of us for whom the locals' everyday experiences seem exotic. The constant presence of the sea. Taking a local bus and pasajero down the coast to La Barra de Potosí or Petatlan. The drama of everyone—from workers to street dogs to huge, prehistoric-looking iguanas—plying always-evolving strategies to compete for scant resources.

There's also the sheer presence of creatures that, simply because we're not used to them, can scare the living bejesus out of you. Last night as I turned back the covers from my side of the bed, I spotted something dark and leggy between the corner of the mattress and formed-concrete bed platform. On closer inspection, it turned out to be one of the biggest spiders I've ever seen—though not a tarantula, it was nearly three inches across.

I'm ashamed that I didn't figure out a way to accommodate the poor thing—like I have so many times, like with bats at home, a scorpion felt inside my pants leg in Texas and cigar-sized cockroaches in Costa Rica. I just couldn't abide the thought of this thing—whose intentions I had no way of knowing—having to scurry just twelve inches to explore my face.

TALKING THE TALK
Part of the adventure, for me, is finding situations in which it's sink or swim with my Spanish. For nearly a decade I've made this beautiful, melodic tongue my second language (actually, third, if you count German, whose hard, guttural sounds have never resonated with my romantic soul). I'm getting pretty good at it, and jump on every chance I get to practice my craft.

The other day, I attended a traditional lamb barbacoa with some fellow guests and friends and family of our host here in Zihuatanejo. I hope I wasn't rude to the non-Spanish-speakers, but I was just irresistibly drawn to the end of the table where all the Spanish speakers were sitting.

When I started learning Spanish about a decade ago, my very first objective was simply to be able to chat amiably with a cab driver about his life, his family and the fortunes of the local futbol or beisbol club. Now that goal has been far surpassed, and I dream of gabbing away with a Mexican family in a real, unmitigated conversation over dinner or a game of Conquian or dominó.

     I find myself unable to decide which is the 
     problem: that things are way more complex 
     than I'll ever know…or way more simple.

A HARDSCRABBLE LIFE
The people here are wonderful. Sure, we've met the occasional surly cab driver or waiter, but the vast majority of our interactions with Zihuatanejenses have been warm and engaging. In so many Spanish-speaking places we've gone, folks assume we're careless tourists who don't really give a rip about their lives and culture.

But here in Zihua., people seem quicker to take you as you are. It doesn't take them long to recognize my considerable investment in learning their language and getting to know a bit about Mexican geography and culture. They seem to really appreciate that. (Of course, I have to be sensitive to the flip side of the culture thing, which is that many Mexicans are eager and proud to show off their increasing grasp of English and of US culture.)

I don't know how Mexicans ever got the reputation, as they did in my parents' generation, of being lazy (This must have arisen in an era in which all "foreigners"—as if there were ever anyone else coming to settle in the US—were seen as challengers to every previous immigrant's slice of the pie.) The folks around here are some of the hardest-working we've ever seen—and often for the least reward.

     Most of us seasonal visitors wouldn't trade 
     places with these folks if it were the last thing 
     we did, yet, still, we envy them.

In the tourist industry, the inequities seem all the more poignant. Given the vicissitudes of seasonal demand and misconceptions about the omnipresence of narco violence, flu outbreaks and other perceived threats, the waiters and taxi drivers and maids and fishing boat captains and tour guides—I could go on—have, somehow, to fund a constant cost of living with a widely variable income.

We feel like we should somehow compensate them for this, while at the same time understanding that too much generosity can reinforce the rich-gringo stereotype and financially impact others who also have to live her year-round. This is just one of many examples of how, despite our growing sense of ownership of this place, we have to remember that we will never understand how things—the economy, politics, machismo and many others—really work around here.

I often find myself unable to decide which is the problem: that things are way more complex than I'll ever know…or way more simple.

HAVING IT BOTH WAYS
I sometimes wonder how these hard-working citizens can seem so complacent in the face of inequities, poor infrastructure and widespread governmental corruption. Still, there's a profound strength about this community. We see it in big brothers and little brothers, daughters and grandmothers walking hand in hand; the colorful waste baskets and "Save Our Bay" signs along the beachside promenade, made by school children; in the large turnout every Sunday night for cultural events at La Cancha, Zihuatanejo's version of the ubiquitous zocalo; in what seems a universal pride in being Zihuatanejenses.

Most of us seasonal visitors wouldn't trade places with these folks if it were the last thing we did, yet, still, we envy them. If only we could have both our privilege and freedoms, and their unshakable values.

I guess this is why I so treasure my connections with Mexico and Mexicans. I can pretend to be that close to the real demands of a life totally committed to family, friendship and faith, without really having to pay the price.

The only thing I have to pay is money…and, I'd like to think, attention.