The words to say it, or how Spanish and English are sent to try us

One of the things I like most about my occasional visits to my friend and neighbour Nacho is that, as we split a bottle of wine, our conversation ranges over any subject that catches our fancy. 

That’s a pretty wide field.

A well-lubricated conversation with Nacho

We generally speak Spanish because, while Nacho has mastered English, he feels he’s so out of practice that he can no longer express himself in it freely. Which is great for me, of course. Talking Spanish naturally gives me an unrivalled opportunity to display, yet again, how little progress I’ve made in the language over the four years we’ve lived in Spain.

To be fair to him, Nacho’s very nice about my command of his language. But then the Spanish generally are kind that way. “You speak excellent Spanish,” they assure me, giving me far more reason to doubt their sincerity than to take pride in any achievement of mine.

“The one thing you do keep getting wrong,” Nacho admitted, “is in the way you use ‘ser’ and ‘estar’.”

Well, yes. ‘Ser’ and ‘estar’. Ghastly verbs with absolutely no logical basis for deciding which to use in what context.

Just to be clear, both translate into English as ‘to be’. Now grammarians define ‘to be’ as a copulative verb, which sounds borderline obscene, but really only means that it couples a subject with its complement, its description. It doesn’t actually convey any meaning. In other words, to put it in technical terms, it’s pretty bloody useless. 

Speakers of Russian and, I believe, Arabic do without any such verb. “The house red” adequately conveys what we mean when we say “the house is red”. “Tatyana student” works the same way. Or “Putin reckless idiot”, I suppose. That, however, is not a safe sentence, though not for grammatical reasons.

Anyway, what this means is that perfectly sensible languages with a rich vocabulary and a fine literature can do without a verb ‘to be’ altogether. Then there are languages like English which has one. But Spanish, just to drive us all crazy, has two.

If you ask Spaniards what the heck the difference is, when you should use one rather than the other, they generally nod sagely and tell you, “ah, ‘estar’ is for things that are temporary – like you’re happy or sad and you may the opposite tomorrow – while ‘ser’ is for things that are essential or permanent – like you’re honest or courageous” (or a liar and a coward, I suppose).

I used to nod sagely back and take a mental note. But then I discovered that being dead uses ‘estar’. Now I have nothing against optimism, and I suppose there is an optimistic side to religion which suggests that death is only a temporary state, but so far no one, to my knowledge, has returned from it (if you exclude certain articles of faith rather than of evidence) and it strikes me as more sensible to regard it as permanent, for all practical purposes.

I suppose it’s a matter of wanting to use the same verb for being dead as for being alive. ‘Estar’, the temporary one, is used for being alive (estar vivo), which makes sense, so perhaps it feels better to use it for being dead too (estar muerto). But feelings aren’t logic and often they’re quite the reverse.

Even more striking is when you describe someone as, say, young. That uses ‘ser’ (ser joven) as though there’s something permanent about it. Now, that’s pushing optimism so far beyond the bounds of realism as to be completely nonsensical. 

Point out that kind of thing to a Spanish speaker, though, and they just nod their heads and look a little perplexed. Some time ago, and on a different point of Spanish grammar, a native speaker told me that they say things in a certain way because “it sounds better”. Well, OK. I can go along with that. Though it does mean we foreigners have to do a lot of work to learn which form is generally regarded as sounding better.

“Ah, but then there’s something absolutely horrible in English too,” Nacho remarked once we’d exhausted the subject of the copulative verbs, “and that’s your phrasal verbs. How on earth do you expect us to learn them?”

That set me back a bit. Because I’ve always thought highly of the phrasal verbs in English and, indeed, in other Germanic languages (such as the most Germanic of them all, German). They provide us with a huge range of additional terms to convey all sorts of subtle shades of meaning while still using perfectly ordinary, day-to-day words. That’s a verb and a small word, as often as not a preposition. Which is great.

On the other hand, I can see where Nacho’s coming from. After all, the meaning of the original verb often has only the very slightest of connections with the meaning of the phrasal version. 

So, for instance, ‘to run out’ shares practically no common meaning with ‘to run’. What if we ‘run something up’, say a flag on a flagpole? I appreciate that can be done a little quickly, at a bit of a run you might say, though only metaphorically. However, the phrasal verb is still ‘run up’ even if you do it in time to a dirge, with painful slowness. And what about ‘running someone through’ with a sword? Not a nice thing to do and we should resist the temptation, but in any case, the connection with running seems extremely tenuous. 

Yep. I do feel that it’s a great strength of the Germanic languages, a great enrichment of English, that we’re able to talk about ‘running out’, ‘running up’, ‘running through’, as well as ‘running down’, ‘running over’, not to mention ‘running off’, ‘running away’, ‘running into’, ‘running by’ and so on. But I agree it makes English as much of a pain for Nacho as ‘ser’ and ‘estar’ make Spanish for me.

From which I conclude that, invaluable though it is for helping us communicate, especially when lubricated by a bottle of wine, a language can be an absolute pain in the backside (which roughly translates as ‘es un coñazo’ though, this being a family blog, I’m not going to explain the root of the word ‘coñazo’).