The mother of invention
April 1st, 2008Day two of my diary on language on Economist.com
Learning the language behind the language
LEARNING other languages brings you the realisation — at first disappointing, but ultimately comforting — that 99% of the conversations around you are utterly humdrum. Those young toughs on the street corner flinging words at each other like knives sound much less menacing when you know they’re only debating which film to go to, and a passionate tête-a-tête in the supermarket aisle deflates somewhat when it’s about tomato sauce.
The way a language sounds to someone who doesn’t speak it is something that I’m not sure has a formal name, but which I’ll call mood. You can learn grammar, vocabulary, idiom, usage and accent, but nobody will ever teach you mood.
Yet you must know mood to speak like a native, and it’s something we all recognise. To English-speakers, Italian sounds excitable, Russian sounds annoyed and depressed, Brazilian Portuguese like flirting, and Hebrew like an argument. Newsreaders do their best to eliminate mood, which is why the news sounds the same in all languages. (Try it next time you’re channel-hopping in a hotel room.)
Intonation plays a big role in mood; so do facial expressions, gestures and speed. But mood is also subjective: it depends on your perception of the speaker. To Israeli Jews, Arabic sounds sinister and threatening. To Palestinians, Hebrew sounds arrogant and overbearing. However, once you know the language and can evaluate what people are saying, you gradually stop noticing mood.
Except, that is, when different countries speak the same language.
This is what makes Spanish interesting. I learned it in Mexico, and Spanish-speakers from elsewhere laughed at my faint air of officiousness. I came away from a visit to Argentina speaking it with Italianate disdain. In Cuba I noticed that Spanish sounded confrontational, like Hebrew, and concluded that both had something to do with the mix of socialism and hot weather (though the transition to capitalism hasn’t improved Israeli manners much). And I wondered whether the Guatemalans’ tragically violent history came before or after their sad way of speaking.
Grammatically, Spanish is pretty dull. Like all the Romance languages, it reminds you that English is actually a class-conscious sandwich of two layers: short, pithy Anglo-Saxon, and the more laboured Latinate forms spoken originally by the aristocracy. Spanish has only the latter, which is why any text translated from English comes out about 20% longer.
However, over time the usage of Spanish words has diverged. Sometimes this can be entertaining. When a Mexican says “take the bus”, toma el camión, a Spaniard hears “drink the lorry.” When a Cuban says “take the bus”, coge la guagua, most of the rest of Latin America hears something quite unprintable.
Where Spanish really shows off its diversity is in the slang. When “Amores Perros”, a blockbuster film about the Mexico City underworld, was released a few years back, Spaniards complained about the lack of subtitles.
Argentinian Spanish has its own sub-language, lunfardo, thought to derive principally from the criminal jargon of Italian immigrants, and similar to Cockney rhyming slang.
Chile has an entire mini-language built around one word, huevón. No me huevees con esas hueveadas, huevón would come out in American English as “don’t screw me around with that crap, you dumb-ass”. In Mexico similar flexibility is exhibited by the verb chingar, which means “to rape”.
But Mexicans are also extraordinarily inventive with the word for that which is most sacred in Catholic culture: la madre, the mother. To mother (madrear) something is to wreck it; to “give it to someone in the mother” is to beat him up. Things that are annoying or of no consequence are just “mothers” (”don’t bother me with those madres“), while “not even mothers” means “no way”, and the exclamation “Mothers!” is similar to “Whoops!”
Something that “has no mother” can be either ultra-cool or absolutely appalling, depending on the context; conversely, something terrific can equally well be either “little mother” or “at full mother”. Something you don’t care about is “worth mother” to you. A total mess is a desmadre, or “dismother”. And to be totally fed up is to be “up to the mother”.
Needless to say, the worst insult you can pay a Mexican man is to tell him to chingar his mother. Such is the risk of being misunderstood that, if someone’s mother comes up in conversation, it is considered prudent in polite society to refer always to “your lady mother”.