They say that in Valladolid they speak the purest Spanish. And apparently it’s powerful as well as pure.
From the Castilla y León pages of El Mundo, the headline: “Una pareja de sexagenarios desarma a un atracador en su portal sólo con palabras”.
The story begins:
El poder de la palabra es inmenso, pero no sólo en sentido figurado. Solamente con ese arma, una pareja sexagenaria logró desarmar al atracador que trató de robarles cuando entraban en el portal de su vivienda en […] Valladolid.
When I first moved to Spain, I found that many Spanish words are similar to high-register Latin-root words in English. It was easy to start cruising along, thinking this language learning wasn’t so bad after all, when suddenly I’d be brought up short by something completely unexpected.
Once I’d learned to drop my aitches – easy enough for an Essex gir! – I could cope with hotel and hostal, but staying in a pensión was somewhat less intuitive.
Continue reading “something to celebrate”
Translating an article on Brazilian beaches, I’ve just learned a new word in Spanish:
carioca.
1. adj. Natural de Río de Janeiro. U. t. c. s.
2. adj. Perteneciente o relativo a esta ciudad del Brasil o a su provincia.
(definition from the Diccionario de la Lengua Española.)
I suppose it’s my lousy accent than makes me connect it to karaoke. It does mean, though, that I should find it relatively easy to remember carioca by picturing the Rio carnival procession all singing karaoke as they dance the samba.
Actually, that’s such a dreadful image that I hope I don’t have much call to talk about the people and activities of Rio in Spanish.
In today’s El Mundo there’s a report entitled Los borrosos rostros de la nueva Unión – “the vague faces of the new Union”. (It’s in the print edition, but it seems you need a subscription to read the article online.) In it, they talk about the new president of the European Union and the “superministra”, Catherine Ashton.
There are two possible reasons for that slip, I think: one, going back to the Eighties when I first learned about databases with dBase II, an Ashton-Tate product; and two, the fact that the article is accompanied by a photo of a dalek.
Continue reading “alien affairs”
Not all the local flora is as reminiscent of my childhood as yesterday’s plane trees. This, the madroño, (arbutus unedo), is called a strawberry tree in English, and, although it’s been introduced elsewhere as an ornamental shrub, the only part of the British Isles where it’s native is Ireland.
don't confuse the narrator 