CHICLE Language Institute blogs

Practice your Spanish daily v2 - Babel

CHICLE — Wed, 23 May 2012 17:43:01 +0000

In our last email (these are collected on the blog pages of our website), I included some examples from Gerald Erichsen's Spanish.about.com daily emailed lesson. Today's sentence is so wonderful, that I'm including it today. I'm surely not describing my workplace, right?

234. Spanish Word of the Day: babel

From Gerald Erichsen, your Guide to Spanish Language

Today's word

Palabra

la babel, el babel

Significado

a place where there is much disorder, a place where there is a lot of talking but little understanding, bedlam, mixture of languages

Ejemplo

¿Entiende ahora el lector las proporciones cabalísticas de mi confusión, la babel comunicativa en que vivo?

Traducción

Does the reader now understand the mysterious proportions of my confusion, the infectious bedlam in which I live?

I hope some of you will subscribe to the blog. You can get copies of entries in your email. There is a sign-up on the right on this page. Up until now, these entries are taken directly from this email newsletter. They are usually not original, just something about language and literature that has grabbed my attention. However, as the email is irregular, I plan to add items directly to the blog in the future. I have quite a backlog that I'd like to unload. So, unless you sign up, you might miss them.

Tags:

Spanish

Practice your Spanish daily (4/11/12)

CHICLE — Fri, 04 May 2012 00:19:54 +0000

While we, of course, believe that attending classes at CHICLE is the best way to learn Spanish, we do encourage our students to spend as much time as possible listening, reading, and speaking Spanish outside of class. Gerald Erichsen, at Spanish.about.com, sends me a word a day, accompanied by very creative sentences using that word. You can sign up for this. I usually try to translate the Spanish sentence he sends before looking at his translation. I'm getting better at colloquial translation and think I have even occasionally improved on his. Here are a few recent ones that are fun.

Palabra

la querencia

Significado

place someone feels at home, a drawing or attachment for such a place, homing instinct, attachment, something one feels attachment for or at home with, home, nest

Ejemplo

Parece, pues, que la precoz querencia de mi hija sieteañera por Beckham no es sólo una manifestación de rebeldía contra un padre omnipotente, sino que denota que se está produciendo ya un alejamiento afectivo y una devaluación de mi imagen.

Traducción

It seems than that the early longing of my seven-year-old daughter for Beckham is not only a rebellion against an omnipotent father, but it also shows that there is already a detachment from and devaluation of my image going on.

Palabra

la lisonja

Significado

flattering remark, flattery

Ejemplo

Bien puede haber puñalada sin lisonja, mas pocas veces hay lisonja sin puñalada. (Refrán)

Traducción

One can well be stabbed without flattery, but seldom is there flattery without stabbing. (Proverb)

You can also subscribe to his Dichos, refranes y citas daily email. This can be a little trickier to translate if it's one you're not familiar with. There are also some useful links to blogs, articles, exercises, quizes, and lists on his main page.

Tags:

Spanish

Video to watch (3/30/12)

CHICLE — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 16:59:36 +0000

Except for the fact that this video is in German, it has nothing to do with language. But watch it even if you don't know a word of German. I promise you that you will kench! (That's the language part of today's blog entry.)

My friend Victoria sent me a link to a site that I hope to explore a lot more: Matador Network's Language Learning page. The site is for travel and travel writers and this page seems to have an abundance of interesting uploads.

Kenchis #4 in a list of obsolete English words posted by Heather Carriero.

4. Kench

Verb intr. – “To laugh loudly” – This Middle English word sounds like it would do well in describing one of those times when you inadvertently laugh out loud while reading a text message in class and manage to thoroughly embarrass yourself.

Check out jargogle and deliciate.

Tags:

English

Yiddish Books Recovered (3/13/12)

CHICLE — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 23:04:31 +0000

I haven't finished a book in way too long, so I'm really happy to recommend this one to you. It's Aaron Lansky's Outwitting History, published by our own Algonquin Press in 2005. I truly did laugh-out-loud reading this.

In 1980, a twenty-three-year-old student named Aaron Lansky set out to rescue the world’s abandoned Yiddish books before it was too late. Twenty-five years and one and a half million books later, he’s still in the midst of a great adventure. Filled with poignant and often laugh-out-loud tales from Lansky’s travels across the country as he collected books from older Jewish immigrants—books their own children had no use for—Outwitting History also explores brilliant Yiddish writers and enables us to see how an almost-lost culture is the bridge between the Old World and the future.

The book provides a wonderful history of Jewish immigrants who focused on assimilation and of those who tried to preserve the Yiddish culture they came from. I, somewhat naively perhaps, think that if everyone understood the continuity and similarities in the waves of immigration to the U.S., they'd be hopeful about the future of our country.

I'm one of those 3nd generation Jews who only heard Yiddish spoken when I wasn't supposed to understand what was being said. It's one of the languages I would study if I could live to 110. It's such a mishmash of other languages and so much fun. But Lansky teaches us that it is a real language, albeit one of those that may be disappearing.

Lansky writes: "Yiddish (the word means 'Jewish') first emerged in the tenth or eleventh century among Jews living along the banks of the Rhine River. The more distinct their communities became, the more their spoken language differentiated itself from that of their non-Jewish German-speaking neighbors. Not unlike Black English, it became the 'in' language of a people on the outs, except that in the case of Yiddish, Jews brought with them a core culture rooted in Hebrew (the language of the Torah) and Aramaic (the language of the later sections of the Talmud)."

He describes Yiddish as an amalgam of German, Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin, French, Italian, Ladino, Judeo-Greek, Judeo-Persion, Judeo-Provençal, Polish, Ukrainian, White Russian, and Slovak.

For fun, here's a Wikipedia list of English words of Yiddish origin.

You can also check out an earlier blog piece I wrote on Yiddish, nu?

Tags:

Yiddish

Pan comido vs. piece of cake (2/22/12)

CHICLE — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 21:32:41 +0000

Here's a Spanish expression I love (from Spanish Word of the Day):

ser pan comido

English translation: to be a piece of cake Spanish:
¡Este laberinto es pan comido!  (English: This labyrinth is a piece of cake!)

Pan comido is literally eaten bread. We also say easy as pie. In Chile they say ser una papa (to be a potato) but that means to be lousy at something in Mexico. I also found un juego de niños (kid's game). We say child's play.

The plot thickens. On this wonderful page that has Spanish-English side by side, I find an English translation for pan comido that is doddle. (I will revisit this site in the future—it's marvelous.) Doddle turns out to be a real word. I can't wait to use it in conversation. I also see easy peasy used. And cinch and many others.

These must represent some cultural differences (partially based on carbohydrates), but I have no idea what they might be.

Tags:

Spanish

English

Wellerism (2/7/12)

CHICLE — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 22:25:05 +0000

I've written about Anu Garg and his brilliant Wordsmith a.word.a.day website before. He has been sending out emails since 1994. The NY Times says "The most welcomed, most enduring piece of daily mass e-mail in cyberspace." I agree. I particularly love the weekly summary he sends out with amazing comments on the week's words from individuals throughout the world.

Last week he ran a contest on Wellerisms.

MEANING: noun: An expression involving a familiar proverb or quotation and its facetious sequel. It usually comprises three parts: statement, speaker, situation.

Examples: "We'll have to rehearse that," said the undertaker as the coffin fell out of the car. "Prevention is better than cure," said the pig when it ran away from the butcher.

ETYMOLOGY: After Sam Weller and his father, characters known for such utterances in Charles Dickens's novel Pickwick Papers. Earliest documented use: 1839.

The responses were wonderful. Check them out here. Here are his top three winners. I actually had some other favorites. But I defer.

"Would you put it on one side for me?" he said when the man at the Airfix shop told him they had a model Italian cruise ship in stock. -Bullus Hutton, Vancouver, Canada (bullus shaw.ca)

"Health is wealth," said the doctor as he totaled his earnings. -Rama Bishnoi, Mumbai, India (ramabishnoi yahoo.com)

"Darling, I've missed you!" she said as she fired the gun a second time. -Ken Kirste, Sunnyvale, California (kkkirste sbcglobal.net)

Tags:

English

Dividual/Dividuality (1/19/12)

CHICLE — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 20:21:11 +0000

I've run across this word several times. But it seemed particularly important when I heard it discussed on On the Media on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday this past Monday. MacArthur Fellow Louis Hyde describes it as our collective being or self, our public self, how we contain community in our "inside self." It is in contrast to individual and individuality. I think it may describe how we primarily view ourselves—as members of a community whose furtherance is our responsibilty and goal or as individuals, primarily responsible to ourselves.

Raised as we are in what must be one of history's most individualistic societies, we may have difficulty really understanding dividuality.

The definitions are definitely peculiar.

Separate, distinct.
Divisible, divided.
Shared, held in common (with others).

1 and 2 seem quite the opposite of 3. Alternatively, I found:

Divided, shared, or participated in, in common with others.

That's not a whole lot more clear. P2P, unavailable on Jan. 16 as they are opposing the SOPA legislation, writes: "a physically embodied human subject that is endlessly divisible and reducible to data representations via the modern technologies ..." Going from bad to worse!

However, this website does help, if a wee bit abstruse when you read down its page:

…persons – single actors – are not thought in South Asia to be “individual,” that is, indivisible, bounded units, as they are in much of Western social and psychological theory as well as in common sense. Instead, it appears that persons are generally thought by South Asians to be “dividual” or divisible. To exist, dividual persons absorb heterogeneous material influences. They must also give out from themselves particles of their own coded substances – essences, residues, or other active influences – that may then reproduce in others something of the nature of the persons in whom they have originated.” McKim Marriott Hindu Transactions: Diversity without Dualism

The word may be difficult but I'm pretty sure that it in some sense (maybe just as what I want it to mean) underlies all of what Martin Luther King had to say in the wonderful hour that Amy Goodman and Democracy Now presented on Monday. If you have an hour, I strongly recommend that you listen to this broadcast instead of reading it. You can also download it at iTunes as a video broadcast. It is extraordinarily and so sadly still relevant in 2012.

P.S. You'll be glad to know there is an Atlanta band named DiViDUAL.

Tags:

English

Vehicular Languages (12/10/11)

CHICLE — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 20:37:59 +0000

I'm reading three books at once right now. Ridiculous. Cajas en Carton, which I wholeheartedly recommend and will talk about after I finish it, a mystery (that I bought as a gift for someone who is not me), and Is That A Fish in Your Ear: Translation and the Meaning of Everything, by David Bellos.

I've barely begun the last one but was fascinated by a passage in the first chapter. Did you know that "most of the English now spoken and written in the world comes from people who do not possess it natively, making 'English speakers' a minority among the users of the language."?

Bellos says that a "vehicular language" is one that people learn in order to communicate with those who don't speak their language. There are some 7000 languages today and almost everyone who does not speak one of the six or so major languages natively speaks at least a second language. Many speak the language(s) of their neighbors as well as the "major" language prevalent in their area. If you knew Chinese, Hindi, Arabic, Spanish, Russian, Urdu, French, Japanese, and English, you could effectively communicate with about 90% of the world's population. So, 2.5 down and 6.5 to go for me.

Tags:

Languages

Translation

Multiculturism (11/30/11)

CHICLE — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 18:24:33 +0000

I can't resist this one, which a friend sent today. It's a photo taken outside of a Chinese restaurant somewhere in the U.S. It's a little early but we seem to be in the holiday season. If it's a mystery to you, you need to know that many, many Jewish families (including mine when I was a child) traditionally go to Chinese restaurants on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. I guess because all other restaurants are closed at those days.

Tags:

Food

Holiday

Bruschetta (11/16/11)

CHICLE — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 20:43:40 +0000

Speaking of earlier blog entries, I once wrote about taking our basic Italian course so that I could, in part, learn restaurant talk. (I also went to Tuscany that summer.) This comes from the prolific language log that I have recommended and is one of those "I wish I'd thought of that" responses. This one is by Geoffrey Pullum.

Not long ago I went out to see Cockney comedian Micky Flanagan perform at the Festival Theatre in Edinburgh. (One man alone on stage with one microphone. His two-hour mission: to seek out new laughs and new ways to mock civilization; to boldly zing where no man has zinged before. Standup is the bravest of all the performing arts that don't involve a high wire.) Hearing that East London dialect again (I grew up in the London area) was like slipping into a comfortable old pair of shoes.

Flanagan says he was in a posh Italian restaurant in London and ordered the bruschetta for a starter, and the waiter had the nerve to correct his pronunciation. He had said -sh- for the -sch- part, and of course there were glottal stops where the geminate [t] should have been: [bɹʊˈʃɛʔɐ] is how he said it.

"Bruschetta, said the waiter; "Not broo-SHET-a: [bruˈsketta]. In our-a language, is pronounced, [bruˈsketta]."

And in a flash Flanagan retorted: "Yeah? Well in our language it's pronounced 'tomatoes on toast'."

Also, take a quick look at what I found when I did a Google image search for bruschetta.

Tags:

Italian