Words are fun. But what matters is what we say

We had a wonderful holiday in Galicia last week.

That was partly down to the climate. Galicia is up in north-western Spain, on the Atlantic. Set out westward from the coast, and  you’ll end up in the Bronx or in Cancún, depending on your luck (I’ll leave you to decide which would be good luck and which bad). A long range of hills just inland of the north coast ensures that the whole region has a cooler, Atlantic-fed micro-climate, so when it was 35 C in Valencia where we live, it was in the low twenties, and sometimes lower still, up there.

Cow herding in Galicia
Weather like England’s. A relief after the Valencian furnace

The relief was immense. Why, it even amazed me to discover that sitting on a café terrace while the rain diluted my coffee, was a pleasure rather than an annoyance. Of course, it was fine rain, of the kind I became so familiar with in England. Indeed, a Galician who knows England confirmed to me that the weather in the two places is pretty much identical. 

One thing about the Galicians is that they speak their own language, distinct from standard Spanish (also known as ‘Castilian’). 

People are generally not good at learning foreign languages. When they do, they often create their own version, by incorporating words and structures from their mother tongue. That’s just what the inhabitants did when the Romans invaded the Iberian peninsula and, as part of crushing the natives into understanding the superior benefits of Roman rule, drove the earlier Celtic languages into extinction.

What the Celts learned instead, though, wasn’t the appalling classical Latin of the Roman elite, with its ghastly structures, its multiple declensions and conjugations, but the low Latin spoken by the legionaries, the traders and the shopkeepers who came flowing into Iberia to subdue it, or to make their fortune once it was subdued. That’s the far more user-friendly Vulgar Latin, the Latin of the vulgus, which is the Classical Latin word for the common people. It was a lot closer to modern Italian, say, than to the Latin of the Senate or the poets. 

But as Celts learned it, they gave it a local flavour.

In the northwest, the language that emerged was Galician-Portuguese. Given its name, it probably won’t surprise you to know that it gave rise to two modern languages, Galician and Portuguese. I’ve heard that two people each speaking one of the languages can have a comprehensible conversation. I wouldn’t know about that, but I do know that to my uninitiated ear, it sounds a lot more like Portuguese than Spanish, even though Galicia is in Spain. 

What I liked about the use of the language is that it’s unaggressive. I remember an official in Barcelona who fired a barrage of Catalan at me three times without success, merely, as far as I could tell, to uphold the principle that in Catalonia, officialdom speaks Catalan. Eventually, he switched to Castilian, which it emerged he spoke with complete mastery, hugely better than I did. At least then I was able to understand that he wanted to see my identity papers.

Well, that kind of thing doesn’t happen in Galicia. Everywhere we went, we came across Galician speakers, speaking the language happily with each other. It’s their mother tongue and it’s what they use in their daily lives. If we approached them, however, they switched at once and without reluctance to Castilian, correctly identifying us as foreign. That meant they were using another language though, it turned out, it was one they’d mastered just as entirely as their Galician. 

Basically, they have two languages, and switch with ease from one to the other. 

That, though, makes it quite a chore to learn a third. Sadly, neither Galician nor Castilian is the main language of international communication. We stayed in a village on the Santiago pilgrim path, the Camino as its fans call it. Most pilgrims on it are dependent on that international language. 

Which is English. Or, more accurately, American.

The extent of the problem was clear from the menu we saw outside a local café.

Not quite English

Now, it wasn’t too difficult to work out that ‘Paste with tunafish’ meant ‘pasta with tuna’. And easy to mentally correct the misspelling of ‘patatoes’. Similarly, ‘coffé’ wasn’t too obscure. But ‘came from home’ and ‘water or cane’ were a bit harder.

It turns out that they’re great examples of what can go wrong when you translate directly from a dictionary. 

A ‘caña’ may be a cane, as in a bamboo cane. It can also be a small glass of beer. So what ‘water or cane’ was really offering was a choice between water or a beer. 

The third option was ‘came from home’, which was tougher to crack. 

Now, ‘vino’ as a noun is ‘wine’. As a verb, it’s the third person singular of the simple past of the verb ‘venir’, to come. Which in English is ‘came’. Add in the translation of ‘de’ as ‘from’ rather than ‘of’, and it becomes clear that ‘Came from home’ is a direct translation of ‘vino de la casa’, more correctly translated as ‘house wine’.

Still, if I was amused by that menu, I was much more tickled by a sign we saw above a butcher’s shop. 

Marriage announcement

It announced a marriage. Putting up that kind of sign is, apparently, a custom around there. It was in Galician, and my attempted translation of it is:

For St John’s Day, a pilgrim woman and a butcher, ground bread.

N & L 22.07.23

St John’s Day is the 24th of June. It seems that the wedding took place between ‘N’ and ‘L’, one I assume the pilgrim, the other the butcher, on 22 July 2023. We had a drink in the bar opposite and were told that the wedding had indeed taken place on that day.

So what about this ‘grinding bread’ business? After all, you may grind wheat to make your bread. Or if you’re the giant in the Beanstalk story, you may grind an Englishman’s bones to make your bread. But you don’t grind the bread itself, surely?

I turned to my expert on all things Spanish, our good friend Marisa in Valencia. Her reply? “Maybe they had some intimacy before marrying”.

We checked with the waitress in the bar.

“Yup,” she said, “that’s about the size of it”.

Well, she was speaking in Spanish, so those weren’t her exact words. But that was the gist.

What a great sign. Far more fun than the weird menu. One of many moments that made it so enjoyable to spend a little time among the Galicians.