Hola a todos. Mountains crumble, the world turns, and the premise of this blog is changing for the summer. As I’m living in Spain, I will be writing about Castellano (that’s Spanish) from the point of view of an American (that’s me) straining to get quick with the language. “Essays,” is a bit much, and “practical language lessons” doesn’t really roll off the tongue, but I’m going for a mix of the two. There still will be poetry and fiction- ojalá- but right now, I feel practically urgent about getting these linguistic quirks down and out.
I can’t imagine this kind of content will be helpful to anyone who speaks English and Spanish well already, and it might be only marginally useful to someone who speaks Spanish and reads English, but I have a gut feeling that organizing these lessons will be supremely helpful for… me. There’s already a billion-and-one English-to-Spanish language blog posts / forums / 2 minuted animated YouTube doodles / ect, but as my first and most attentive student is myself, I’ll be working through the content by writing it out methodically. A close friend of mine, who grew up with two public school teachers as parents, is apt to say, “The best way to learn is to teach.” And I think that applies even if I’m teaching myself.
So, as a small child told me recently, “Vamos a fiesta.” Yesterday, I was sheltering from an afternoon rain in a panadería, and doing a language exchange with the grandmother of my host family. We were practicing how to say “Una panadería, dos panaderías. Una panadería, dos panaderías.” It’s hard to say! My mistake was saying: Una paNANdería, adding an extra N sound, and that mangled the rhythm. It should be: PanaderÍa. My pronunciation the first time around was so bad that the grandmother, M, shushed me: “Tranquila, hombre.”
Which also threw me, as I’m nobody’s man. I thought I was misunderstanding her, but no, this Spanish grandmother uses “hombre” the same way Americans use “Dude.”
Anyway, this whole charming episode got me thinking about the regular rules of syllable pronunciation in Castellano. The relability of these rules is one of the many reasons why Castellano is approachable to native English speakers, and I find the rhythm of Castellano hypnotizing. The lsnguage moves like agua corriente because each syllable, and in Castellano almost every syllable is a morpheme, and so contains an almost equivalent information value. Un mano? A hand. Un manzito? Someone dexterous. Un manazo? Someone very clumsy. Mandar? To give commands. Each syllable communicates a bite of information: Is it a noun? Is it plural? What is the noun’s gender? (Obviously gender is indicated in two places- we love categories.) Or- it’s a verb? What tense? And do on. So although word order conveys emphasis, the placement of morphemes conveys the bulk of the information, and the regular rhythm, or stress, is how we mark time across the river of morphemes. It also means that when native speakers cut off syllables: “‘toy’” (estoy) or “Voy a ir pa’ al cine” it totally throws me.
Ok, I’m going to lay out the rules of pronunciation in Castellano here. There’s only three! Then, I’ll demonstrate with a poem. Actually, reading Spanish poetry aloud is a very good way to practice familiarity with stess.
So imagine you encounter a written word for the first time, and don’t know what to stress.
1) if the word ends in A) a vowel B) n or C) s, stress the second to last syllable. EVEN IF THE SECOND – TO – LAST SYLLABLE IS ALSO THE FIRST SYLLABLE. OJos, TANtas, ataDURas.
2) if the word ends in a consanant that’s not n or s, stress the last syllable. soleDAD.
3) in all other sitauations (alledgedly) there will be an accent mark to guide you.
You don’t need many rules, as almost all nouns and adjectives in Castellano end in a vowel or, if plural, S or N.
Here is a poem called Melodía (1902) by Else Lasker – Schüler to demonstrate:
TUS OJos SE POsan EN LOS MÍos,
NUNca TUvo MI VIda TANtas ataDURas,
jaMÁS esTUvo TAN anCLAda EN TI
TAN hondaMENte indeFENsa.
The result is a visually off-putting, but it’s a useful exercise. In English, it reads:
Your eyes set in mine,
I never in my life had so many leashes,
Never ever before had I anchored in you,
So deeply defenseless.
Y a la sombra de sus sueños
Mi corazón de anémona bebe el viento nocturno
Y yo camino, en flor, a través del jardín
De tu apacible soledad.
And in the shadow of its dreams
My anemone heart drinks the nighttime wind
And I walk, flowering, through the flower garden
Of your gentle loneliness.
cdzhouse 