[Fwd: [code-switching] Spanglish (fwd)]--LONG!

[Dave Robertson]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [code-switching] Spanglish (fwd)
Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2000 20:45:15 -0400 (EDT)
From: Alkisti Fleischer <fleischa at gusun.georgetown.edu>
Reply-To: code-switching at egroups.com
To: code-switching at egroups.com

This article on "Spanglish" will be of interest to list members...
AF

The gravitas of Spanglish
The Chronicle of Higher Education; Washington; Oct 13, 2000; Ilan Stavans;

Volume:
                         47
Issue:
                         7
Start Page:
                         B7
ISSN:
                         00095982
Full Text:
Copyright Chronicle of Higher Education Oct 13, 2000

[Headnote]
slang, n. The grunt of the human hog (Pignoramus Intolerabilis) with an
audible memory. -Ambrose Bierce

ONCE ASKED by a reporter for his opinion on el espangles-one term used to
refer to Spanglish south
of the border-the Nobel Prize-winner Octavio Paz is said to have responded:
"Ni es bueno ni es malo,
sino abominable." Indeed, it is commonly assumed that Spanglish is a bastard
jargon: part Spanish and
part English, with neither gravitas nor a clear identity. It is spoken (or
broken) by many of the
approximately 35 million people of Hispanic descent in the United States,
who, no longer fluent in the
language of Cervantes, have not yet mastered that of Shakespeare.

The trouble with this view is that it is frighteningly nearsighted. Only
dead languages are static, never
changing. After the various forms of Chinese, English is the second most
widely spoken language around
the world today, with 350 million speakers; Spanish is the third, with 250
million. In the Americas, where
English and Spanish cohabit promiscuously, Spanglish spreads effortlessly.
"Tiempo is money," intones
an advertisement running on a San Antonio radio station. Musicians and
literati use Spanglish without
apology in songs, novels, poems, and nonfiction-often merely sprinkling in a
few words, but also using a
full-blown dialect. Even on the campaign trail, George W Bush's nephew,
George P Bush, can be heard
at political rallies switching between Spanish, English, and, yes,
Spanglish.

Not surprisingly, Spanglish has become a hot topic. For some time, I've been
working on a lexicon of
the language, and this semester I'm offering a course based on my research,
"The Sounds of Spanglish."
In historical and geographic scope, it is, I believe, the first of its kind
and has drawn about 60 students
(unusual for a small liberal-arts institution like Amherst College). The
buzz the course and the dictionary
have created on National Public Radio and in newspapers around the globe has
brought home to me just
how much interest the subject of Spanglish arouses these days. But it also
generates anxiety-and even
xenophobia. In the United States, it announces to some people an overall
hispanizacion of society;
abroad, it raises the specter of US. cultural imperialism and the creation
of a "McLengua."

But a language cannot be legislated. It is the most democratic form of
expression of the human spirit.
Every attack serves as a stimulus, for nothing is more inviting than that
which is forbidden. To seize upon
the potential of Spanglish, it is crucial to understand the development of
both Spanish and English.

Antonio de Nebrija, the first to compile a Spanish grammar, noted in the
15th century: "Siempre la lengua
fue companera del imperio." An imperial tool, indeed, with a clear-cut task:
to spread the sphere of
influence of the Catholic crown. But, as the ethnolinguist Angel Rosenblatt
argued as far back as 1962,
Spanish was never simply transplanted; instead, it adapted to the new
reality. For more than 500 years,
Spanish has twisted and turned in spontaneous fashion, from the Argentine
Pampas to the rough roads of
Tijuana. Today, it is as elastic and polyphonic as ever. A person in Madrid
can communicate with
someone in Caracas, but numerous nuances-from meaning to accent and
emphasis-distinguish the two.

The verbal dimension of the Conquest is, I am convinced, a little-known
aspect of the encounter between
Europe and the pre-Columbian world that ought to be analyzed in detail. For
the Conquest involved not
only political, military, and social colonization; it was an act of
linguistic subjugation, imposed on millions
of Indian peoples who spoke such languages as Mayan, Huichol, and Tarascan
in Mexico, and
Arucanian, Guarani, and Quechua in South America. The Spanish language
spoken today on the
continent that ranges from Ciudad Juarez to Tierra del Fuego is an acquired
artifact. Of course, the fact
that Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz and Jorge Luis Borges wrote their poems and
stories in Cervantes's
tongue doesn't mean that they wrote in translation. Their Spanish was as
much theirs as it was the
property of Benito Jeronimo Feijoo, Miguel de Unamuno, or Federico Garcia
Lorca. But their language,
as such, arrived in the Americas in far different fashion than Spanish came
to the Iberian Peninsula. It is
no coincidence that 1492, the annus mirabilis in Iberian history, when
Spanish began to be standardized
and the Jews were expelled, was also the year that Columbus, and the
language of Iberia, sailed the
ocean blue.

IT IS IN THIS PERIOD that Spanish became a language of power, a global
language with an army, a
language through which Catholic Spain concentrated its strength and
announced itself


                                           Enlarge 200%
                                           Enlarge 400%



as a well-delineated nation to other countries, spreading its world-view in
northern Africa, Turkey, the
Philippines, the Caribbean, and the Americas. But what was being imposed?
The answer might surprise
those critics of Spanglish who worry about linguistic impurity.

It was also in 1492 that Nebrija, a respected scholar at the University of
Salamanca, published his
Gramatica la lengua castellana, the first grammar of the Spanish language,
and his Diccionario
latino-espanol. Shortly after, around 1495, he came out with the Vocabulario
espanol-latino. The climate
was ripe in Spain not only for the consolidation of Castile and Aragon into
a single Catholic empire, but
also for a unifying tongue that would help centralize political and social
power. The so-called Reconquista
of Muslim-held territory in Spain, which had started in the 11th century,
was finally complete. But to
become one, a nation needs a set of symbols, a shared history, a centralized
power structure-and a
single, commonly understood language. Castilian Spanish became that
language.

By devoting himself to standardizing and cataloging the spelling, syntax,
and grammar of Castilian
Spanish, Nebrija legitimated a language whose speakers had only recently
become self-conscious about
its use. Over a period of several centuries, the vulgar Latin spoken in the
peripheries of the Roman
Empire, which was different from the classical Latin of authors like Ovid
and Seneca, had evolved on the
Iberian Peninsula into various dialects. Those, in turn, had been gradually
absorbed by one, Castilian.
The language of the New World was also penetrating Iberian Spanish. For
example, the 1492
Diccionario contained the Latin term "barca" for a small rowboat; the 1495
Vocabulario listed the Indian
term "canoa," from the Nahuatl, followed by the Latin definition.

The consolidation of Spanish began a period of intense intellectual and
artistic fertility. The 150 years that
followed Nebrija's work was the so-called Golden Age of Spanish arts and
literature, of poets,
playwrights, and novelists like Fray Luis de Leon, Santa Teresa de Jesus,
Lope de Vega, Francisco de
Quevedo, Calderon de la Barca, Luis de Gongora, and, especially, Miguel de
Cervantes.

The first full-length dictionary of the Spanish language appeared in 1611
(almost exactly in between the
release of the two parts of Don Quijote de la Mancha, which appeared in 1605
and 1615). The Tesoro
de la lengua castellana o espanola was put together by a lexicographer of
the name Sebastian de
Covarrubias Orozco. Like Nebrija, Covarrubias was attached to the University
of Salamanca, but as a
student. Of his academic qualifications, we know only that he was a priest,
a clerk, and a religious
instructor. The dictionary was his sole work, but it is unclear how he came
to produce it.

For years, it was referred to in various sources as Etimologias, because of
the emphasis it placed on the
Latin, Greek, and Hebrew origins of Spanish words. Covarrubias was also
versed, although less
competently, in French and Italian; but he knew nothing of Arabic, which had
strongly influenced Spanish
from the 10th to the 15th centuries. As most intellectual matters were at
that time, the dictionary was also
prepared under the shadow of the Inquisition, and the title page lists
Covarrubias as a "consultor del
santo oficio de la inquisicion."

Covarrubias argued, in a note following the frontispiece in his book, that
he wanted Spain to catch up to
the other nations of Europe. By royal decree, Italy and France had
previously established official
academies for the study of their own languages. (The Accademia della Crusca
published its six volumes
of a dictionary in 1612; the dictionary of the Academie Franqaise, whose
mandate was "to purify" the
French tongue, took shape from 1639 to 1694.) But Nebrija's and
Covarrubias's dictionaries were
printed privately, and they sold poorly.

It wasn't until 1713 that Juan Manuel Fernandez Pacheco, Marquis of Villena,
founded the Real
Academia Espanola de la Lengua Castellana, which was given official approval
by Philip V a year later.
>>From its inception, the academia was intent on both institutionalizing the
dialect of Castilian on the
peninsula (as its very name makes clear) and safeguarding the purity of the
language for posterity. It took
14 years-from 1726 to 1740-to produce the six volumes of the famously
disappointing Diccionario de
autoridades that were supposed to do that. The work's limitations say much
about Spanish character and
history-and the Spanish language.

The original members of the academia were neither lexicographers nor
academics. They were devotees.
Their motto, much ridiculed in modem days, was established as "Limpia, fija
y da esplendor"-"clean,
standardize, and grant splendor." The word "limpia" cannot but invoke the
concept of "limpieza de
sangre," purity of blood, which the Spanish Inquisition used to distinguish
between Old Christians and
New Christians. The former made the nation proud; the latter (those Jews
who, before and after the
official expulsion of Jews from Spain, ostensibly converted to Christianity,
but practiced Judaism at
home) had to be rooted out. The animosity against Jews, Muslims, and women,
as well as the desire not
to include rude terms and sexual innuendoes, was represented in the
dictionary's pages. Definitions were
substantiated with a quota of textual excerpts from established intellectual
figures of the Golden Age.
Above all, the dictionary strove to be a replica of its French and Italian
models.

Only in the past century, however, has Spain begun to reflect on its
linguistic heritage-if only
halfheartedly. That is happening at a time when Spain is once again fraught
with cultural anxiety. The
advent of democracy in 1974, and the economic boom and social stability
ushered in by the Socialist
regime of Felipe Gonzalez, have produced an era of fractured identity, as
various groups, from Catalunya
to the Basque country, promote their ancestral tongues as a ticket of
autonomy. Increasingly, Catalan
and Galician, which have much in common with Occitan and Portuguese,
respectively, are recognized as
separate languages in Spain. The fact that Castilian Spanish is still the
official language has produced civil
and legislative tension.

Yet the soul-searching about the Spanish language has not extended to
consideration of its role as an
instrument of colonial control. That is because Spain is mired in a symbolic
battle with the United States.
Still smarting from the 1898 loss of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines
to U.S. influence, the Spanish
take pride in the fact that their language is now the second-most-important
tongue in the land of their
former enemy. Noting Spain's importance in the American past, King Juan
Carlos proudly announced
during the Quincentennial of Christopher Columbus's "discovery" of the
Americas that "Espana esta al
centro del pasado de los Estados Unidos." That same year, Puerto Rico, in a
nationwide referendum,
established Spanish as the island's official languagefor which Spain awarded
the Puerto Rican people the
prestigious Principe de Asturias prize for extraordinary achievement. And
only a few months ago, the
prize went to branches of the academia in the Americas, in recognition of
their efforts to preserve the
language of Nebrija.

Small wonder that, in such an atmosphere, the melding of Spanish with
English in Spanglish seems
threatening.

Of course, English makes up the other part of Spanglish. The fact that
Shakespeare's language has no
official body like the Real Academia Espanola to protect it is reason to
rejoice. Dictionaries have been
produced by individuals unaffiliated with political causes, like Robert
Cawdrey, Noah Webster, and, of
course, Samuel Johnson-the insuperable Dr. Johnson-who remains a magisterial
model.

In many ways, Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language, which first
appeared in 1755, followed the
same pattern as the Spanish dictionary, using quotations from canonical
figures to put a word's usage in
the proper context. In his introduction, Dr. Johnson noted that language was
in constant mutation. Still, he
said, his mission was to honor his country so "that we may no longer yield
the palm of philology without a
contest to the nations of the continent" and to give "longevity to that
which its own nature forbids to be
immortal."

But Johnson's task was not to promote the worldview of a state or empire. He
was the quintessential
individual. He argued against establishing an academy of the English
language, lest "the spirit of English
liberty" be hindered or destroyed. He believed the worst malady to afflict a
language was spread by
translators too prone to use foreign words, especially French, rather than
colloquial alternatives. At the
same time, he was open to foreign influences, tracing words to Greek, Roman,
and other etymologies,
and allowing for neologisms.

Even the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, by far the most reputed
lexicon in the English
language, epitomizes individualism and openness. It was not an official
group, but a university (and within
it, Richard Chevenix Trench, then Dean of Westminster), that called in 1857
for a new dictionary to cure
"the deficiencies of the language." Work by hundreds of people around the
world began in 1878, and the
actual publication of "125 constituent fascicules" took place from 1884 to
1928. While the endeavor was
dedicated to Queen Victoria, and early copies were presented to King George
V and to the president of
the United States, it was, by all accounts, a nonofficial effort by Oxford
University and the Clarendon
Press. And it took as its objective categorizing words from English-language
regions far and wide.

THE BIRTH OF SPANGLISH per se is not too difficult to place in this history.
>>From 1492 through the
mid-19th century, the encounter of the Anglo-Saxon and Hispanic cultures
produced a bare minimum of
verbal miscegenation. The chronicles of conquest and conversion of Alvar
Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, El
Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Gaspar Perez de Villagra, Fathers Eusebio Kino
and Junipero Serra, and
many others, for example, were primarily targeted at the Iberian Peninsula.
They were composed in
Castilian Spanish and colored by few regionalisms.

The linguistic picture changed dramatically in the 19th century in the
region that is now the Southwestern
United States. Between 1803, when Thomas Jefferson negotiated the Louisiana
Purchase, and 1848,
when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo signed over almost one-third of
Mexico's land to the United
States, Anglo arrivals created a dialogue between English and Spanish,
beginning a tentative merging of
the two tongues.

With the 1848 treaty, the Mexican people in the Southwest became, overnight,
Americans. Curiously,
however, no mention was made anywhere in the document of the inhabitants'
madre lengua, although
newspaper reports noted that Spanish was to be respected. Soon, however,
English became the
dominant tongue of business and diplomacy, although usage of Spanish in
schools and homes did not
altogether vanish. Then, with the Spanish-American War, and U.S. control
over formerly Spanish
colonies, the United States replaced the Spanish empire as a global power.
The Spanish language was
out, at least politically; English was in. Again, however, Spanish usage
didn't altogether cease; it was kept
alive in areas like Miami and New York, which were becoming magnets for
immigrants.

Nevertheless, it was clear that the communication code was changing. From
1901 until the end of the
millennium, dictionaries of Anglicisms were published with more and more
frequency all across the
Hispanic world-a symptom of verbal cross-fertilization. Words like lasso,
rodeo, amigo, manana, and
tortilla made it into English; mister and money into Spanish. Added to the
mix, numerous Nahuatl words
like molcajete (mortar), aguacate (avocado), and huipil (a traditional
embroidered dress) are accepted
by the Real Academia Espanola as "Americanismos."

Out of this potpourri comes Spanglish-a vital social code, whose sheer
bravura is revolutionizing both
Spanish and, to a lesser extent, English.

There isn't one Spanglish, but many. Issues of nationality, age, and class
make a difference. The
multiplicity is clear in the United States, where the lingo spoken by
Cuban-Americans is different from
socalled Dominicanish (Nuyorican) Spanglish. Localisms abound. There are not
only geographical
differences (Istlos, for instance, is Spanglish for East Los Angeles,
Loisiada is New York's Lower East
Side), but also ethnic ones (chale is a Chicano expression of disagreement,
chompa is Nuyorican for
jumper, Y.u.c.A. stands for Young Urban Cuban American in Florida).

"Ganga Spanglish," as I've heard the jargon spoken by urban youngsters,
introduces other nuances,
incorporating slang from other ethnic groups. Look at a sample of lyrics
from the popular group Cypress
Hill's album Temple of Boom. Ebonics, Chicano Spanglish, and L.A. Spanglish
are intertwined:

Don't turn your back on a vato like me Cuz I'm one broke [expletive] In need
Desperate! What's going
on in the mente Taking from the rich not from my gente Look at that gabacho
slipping Borracho from the
cerveza He's sipping No me vale, madre Gabacho pray to your padre This is
for the time you would
Give me the jale.

In Spanglish, numerous terms come from sports: los doubles (tennis), el
corner and el ofsait (soccer), el
tuchdaun (football), el nokaut (boxing). And then, of course, there's
Cyber-Spanglish, the cybernetic
code used frequently by Internet users. Terms like chatear (to
chat),forwardear (to forward), and el
maus (computer mouse) are indispensable north and south of the Rio Grande,
as well as in Spain and in
the Caribbean.

Here at Amherst, a few students and I did an experiment not long ago: We
invited four Spanglish
speakers of different backgrounds (Brownsville, Tex., Chicago, Los Angeles,
and Miami) to meet for the
first time; the only guideline was that they should not be formal, but
communicate in a comfortable way.
The result was astounding: As soon as the participants familiarized
themselves with one another, the
conversation flowed easily, although the speakers often felt compelled to
define some terms; within 15
minutes, a sense of linguistic community was perfectly tangible.

EBONICS, or black English, provides an interesting comparative case study.
Expressions like "I own
know what dem white folk talkin bout" and "Hey, dog, whass hapnin?" are
common among
AfricanAmerican youth, especially in ghettos across the country. This form
of communication follows its
own grammar and syntax. It is, for the most part, a spoken language nurtured
by oral tradition, even
though the poets and novelists of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920's and
their successors have
transcribed it. And there is little doubt that Ebonics is an intraethnic
slang used by members of a minority
group to establish identity. It dates back to the age of slavery, and,
embraced particularly by poor people
in urban centers, is marked by class.

Spanglish, too, is often an intraethnic vehicle of communication, used in
the United States by Hispanics
to establish empathy among themselves. But the differences with Ebonics are
sharp. For one thing,
Ebonics is not a product of mestizaje, the cross-fertilization of two
perfectly discernible codes; Spanglish
is. Spanglish is also not defined by class, as people in all social strata,
from migrant workers to
politicians, academics, and rv anchors regularly use it, both in the United
States and south of the Rio
Grande.

Of course, the interchange between Ebonics and Spanglish has been strong,
especially in rap music,
where Latino pop stars often imitate their AfricanAmerican counterparts. In
literary works like Piri
Thomas's 1967 memoir of a black Puerto Rican in Spanish Harlem, Down These
Mean Streets, the
hybrid street register also comes through.

But, in many ways, Yiddish (the word means "Jewish") is closer to Spanglish
than Ebonics is. Like
Spanglish, Yiddish was never a unified tongue, but a series of regional
varieties (Litvak, Galitzianer, and
so on). Moreover, while both Yiddish and Spanglish started as intraethnic
minority languages, both
quickly became transnational verbal codes

Benjamin Harshav, in The Meaning of Yiddish, has chronicled the odyssey of
Yiddish from rejection to
full embrace. The dialect was used by East European Jews from the 13th
century until the 20th. Its
linguistic sources were plentiful: Hebrew, German, Russian, Polish, and
other Slavic languages. It was
first known as a gibberish for women and children, looked down upon as
unworthy of Talmudic dialogue
by rabbis and the intelligentsia.

Nevertheless, by the 19th century, a vast majority of poor, uneducated
Jews-male and female alikein the
so-called Pale of Settlement that included Poland, Lithuania, and Galicia
were no longer fluent in Hebrew
and spoke only Yiddish. Time had turned Yiddish from a jargon into a dialect
and, finally, into a mature
language. So, around 1865, Sh. Y. Abramovitch, the grandfather of Yiddish
literature, made the decision
to write his novels and pedagogical treatises in the language. He was
followed, with growing
self-confidence, by figures like Sholom Aleichem. Plays, stories, novels,
poems, commentary, and
translations were produced in Yiddish. In 1978, Isaac Bashevis Singer, a
native of Poland and a New
Yorker by choice, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his Yiddish
works.

Although Yiddish has been eclipsed, its impact is still felt. Today, we are
clearly witnessing a revolution in
culture when the London Economist captions a fuss over mortgage rates "Home
Loan Hooha," or when
The Wall Street Journal headlines a feature on student movements
"Revolution, Shmevolution."

It seems to me that, although Latino and Latin American intelligentsia look
down on Spanglish, attitudes
toward that language will change in a similar fashion. The reason is simple:
Spanglish won't go away.
Instead, as time goes by, it will solidify its statu& Indeed, it is already
in the process of standardizing its
syntax. The question is no longer, What is Spanglish? It is, Where is it
going? Will it grow into a
full-blown language? Is it likely to become a threat to Spanish, or even to
replace it altogether? (English,
our lingua franca, is obviously not at stake.) None of that is impossible,
although the transformation is
likely to take hundreds of years.

We are, clearly, at once witnesses and participants to radical change.
Imagine if, by a miracle, Miguel de
Cervantes was given a copy of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of
Solitude. How many
Americanisms in it might be utterly impenetrable to him? Even if Spanglish
never seizes its chances fully,
the future of Spanish-and of English-will be affected by it.

The day may even come when a masterpiece of Hispanic identity, in order to
be fully appreciated by
millions of people, not only in the United States, but around the world,
shall be composed in the
vernacular: Spanglish. Then it will be translated into English for the
uninitiated reader.

[Author note]
Ilan Stavans is a professor of Spanish at Amherst College Routledge just
released The Essential Ilan Stavans.
Next year, Basic Books will bring out his The Sounds of Spanglish: An
Illustrated Lexicon.



Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or
distribution is prohibited without
permission.

_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.

Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at
http://profiles.msn.com.


-------------------------- eGroups Sponsor -------------------------~-~>
TranslationZone.com - The Source for Professional Translators.
We offer TRADOS Freelance Edition 3 at the low price of $695
when you publish your profile at TranslationZone.com.
http://click.egroups.com/1/9538/15/_/730446/_/971916354/
---------------------------------------------------------------------_->

To Post a message: code-switching at eGroups.com
To Unsubscribe, send a blank message to:
code-switching-unsubscribe at eGroups.com
Web page: http//www.egroups.com/group/code-switching