Words, words and Spanish words

If you scratch me, do I not bleed?” asks Shylock, the Jew, in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. Essentially, we are all the same, with much the same fears and hopes and joys and sorrows. Though naturally there are also differences. For instance, here in Spain, I’m amused to hear people talking about the lovely scent of cooking in Northern Europe, so rich in butter, while we wax so enthusiastic over the Mediterranean diet and all its olive oil.

Still, in most ways, we behave the same way, we experience the same things, and we even express much of all that in similar words. With exceptions, though, some of them surprising. Finding out about them is one of the joys of learning a foreign language. That’s one of my main preoccupations these days, as I work to master Spanish, the language of my adopted country. And marvel at its idiosyncrasies.

The Spanish, it seems, are wary of discussions. They’re apparently afraid that once we start discussing something, we can end up falling out over it, a fear they express by using the same word, discutir, for discuss and quarrel. My experience suggests that they’re often right.

Then there’s existencia which can mean stock, as in stored goods, but also existence. I suppose it makes sense, though. I mean, since there’s not a lot of use in storing anything that doesn’t exist.

The same is true is of competencia. It can mean competence, but it can also mean competition. That also strikes me as reasonably sensible. It pays to be competent if we’re going to plunge into some kind of competition.

Those are cases where Spanish has one word while English has two. On the other hand, they use different words for knowing people rather than knowing facts. As do the French, the Germans and the Italians, to my certain knowledge. Curiously though, that word I just used, ‘knowledge’, is conocimiento, obviously from conocer, which is the kind of knowing that applies to people, as opposed to saber, which is for facts. And yet, at the same time, acquaintances are conocidos, also from conocer. It seems the distinction between the kinds of knowing only lasts while we’re dealing with verbs, but gets lost when we move to the derived nouns.

That doesn’t happen in French. In that closely related language, knowledge is savoir while an acquaintance is a connaissance.

Not that I think any English speaker confuses knowing their friends with knowing that Normans came into England without knocking in 1066 or the Americans kicked the English out in 1776.

The destination of any romantic encounter in Spain?
Or its fate?

Much more fun still is the word novia (or novio) for a fiancée (or fiancé) or even a bride (or groom). But it can also be a girlfriend (or boyfriend). Now, they do have other words for the various levels of relationship, because the Spaniards aren’t dumb, and they know that not every romantic attachment leads to marriage. And yet the multiple meanings of novia/novio do rather suggest that, in Spain, once you’re in a romantic relationship of any kind, the expectation is that you’re on the way to a destination in marriage. Or possibly an inescapable destiny. 

Those are two more words that Spanish again doesn’t distinguish: your destination is your destiny. That makes a GPS fun to listen to. “You have reached your destiny” always strikes me as a fine way to announce that we’re at the end of the road. Full of sinister threat. I’m retired now, but there were certain trips I used to take during my working life, when arriving felt just that doom-laden.

I particularly like the word desgraciadamente. It’s linked to desgracia which can be translated as a disgrace, but also a misfortune. Which it certainly is, because it represents, as the form of the word suggests, a loss of grace, the quality of mercy and purity which Christians see as a gift of God. 

Serious stuff.

Disgrace and misfortune linked. That’s another idea I find it easy to go along with. Danielle and I were on the brink of winning a hard-fought badminton match the other day. All I needed was to pull off the smash the opposition had teed up for me.

The easiest of shots, and I put straight into the net. The other side went on to win. That was a terrible misfortune.

But my playing was a disgrace.