Metro lessons in understanding. And misunderstanding

There are times when I wonder why I ever take the car into central Valencia. It’s not so much the traffic, though that can be a pain (it’s sad how few cars around here seem to be fitted with working indicators), but more a matter of finding a parking space once there. That can take practically as long as the drive in.

Our metro station. A sight worth seeing in its own right

Besides, our local metro station is in a forest. Not a pleasure to pass up, is it? That’s why when I picked up two Croatian friends who were coming to stay, I went by metro instead of by car, even though it meant hauling a case through the woods afterwards. It was a chore, but a small price to pay for a woodland welcome…

“So,” said one of the friends, “what’s the name of the final destination of this train?”

The station is called ‘Lliria’. That initial double-l always intimidates me. It’s as worrying in Spanish as it is in Welsh. For the Spaniards, it seems to be a cross between the ‘j’ in ‘you’re joking’ and the ‘y’ in ‘you’re kidding’, but quite where in between I have trouble deciding.

Still, I’d heard the name many times. I had an answer to the question.

“Liria,” I told him.

Was that right, though? A double ‘l’ pronounced as though it were single?

On the train, as in most countries, a small minority was absorbed in conversation, another reading, another just staring blankly into space. The vast majority were glued to their phones.

One woman had been separated from her friends by the arbitrary emptying of seats. She’d shifted from absorption in conversation to blank staring. She started to pull out a phone, but before she could get focused, I seized my opportunity.

“Excuse me,” I asked, “how do you pronounce the name of this train’s destination?”

She looked momentarily shocked. A stranger? Talking to her? In a metro? But she gathered her thoughts quickly.

“Where are you trying to go?”

“No, no. I don’t want to go there. I just want to know how to pronounce it.”

“You want to know how to pronounce Liria?”

That was quite helpful. A question that contained the answer to mine. Clearly I’d got it right.

Then, however, her friend, two seats away intervened.

“Jiria?”

Of course, she may have said ‘Yiria’. But I heard ‘Jiria’. And, either way, I was back at square one. Was the town called ‘Liria’ or ‘Jiria/Yiria’?

The first woman, now smiling as she understood that I was just a foreigner trying to come to terms with the language, came to my rescue.

“Liria in Castilian. Jiria in Valencian.”

That may have been ‘Yiria’, but I’d got the message. The town’s name was different in Castilian (the Spanish national language) or Valencian (the regional language).

“Don’t worry,” she went on, “we’re not racists in Valencia. You can talk Castilian to us and we’ll answer in the same language. We’re not like the Catalans.”

Valencians aren’t keen on being confused with Catalans. Their language, Valencian, many like to point out, is absolutely not Catalan. For the record, one Valencian friend we asked quickly checked that no one was listening, before telling us that, in all honesty, Valencian really is Catalan.

The reference to Catalans made the conversation more general, as people dived into the current hot topic in Spain, the campaign for independence in Catalonia and the demonstrations, some with outbreaks of violence, that followed stiff gaol sentences handed out to some of the leaders. In Valencia and, I suspect, in most of Spain outside Catalonia, there’s not a lot of sympathy for the independence movement, and the people in the metro were no exception. One woman spoke up for the notion that the national government could, perhaps, use velvet gloves a little more, rather than mailed fists, but she didn’t get much support.

I used to be quite keen on the Catalan case, since they seemed to be something of a different nation, with their own language and traditions, but since the Brexit torment started, I’ve rather cooled on the idea of people walking away from the wider organisation they belong to, just because they can’t be bothered to help reform it.

My Croatian friends had just come from Barcelona. We shared their news that while there was indeed some violence in the city, it was localised and most places were quiet. Everyone nodded at that and made some comments about journalists always focusing on the bad news, but they quickly got back to the more interesting topic of how annoying the Catalans were.

Some Catalans making a point
Not all Spaniards are wholly in favour, though

That didn’t last long, though. The women noticed the young lads across the carriage were eating some kind of multi-coloured hoops, out of a plastic bag. Cereal perhaps, but as one of the women said, it looked like the kind of thing she might feed to her cat. I’d just be thinking that it could have been dog food, but that was close enough.

The lads were courteous and offered the bag around. There were no takers, though. Perhaps we all felt that we didn’t really belong to the right species for the stuff.

The woman I’d first spoken to got off the train before us. She waved as she left and wished us a good evening.

“The language lesson was free,” she said. “A Catalan would have charged for it.”

With those words she left me amused at how easy it was to break down the barriers between fellow travellers on a train, at how friendly relations could be between people from three different countries with three different languages, and at how that contrasted with the animosity on display towards people from just up the road who spoke a language practically identical to their own.

Metro trips are much more fun than car journeys. And so much more instructive.

Catalonia: an appeal for peace with simple words to say it

It was good to see Catalans, or at any rate a great many people both Catalan and non-Catalan, demonstrating on behalf of dialogue in Catalonia this weekend. That’s to get out of the crisis brought on by demands from the Catalan government for the independence of their region. The marchers wore white, the colour of no party but of peace, they carried no national flags, and they had only one demand: let’s talk. Hablamos in Spanish. Parlem in Catalan.

Marching for peace and dialogue in Barcelona

The absence of flags was a good move. Flags stand for nations and nations stand for far more than just the good. You can point with pride to a Dalí or a world-cup winning football team? Just remember that you also have to take on board the persecution of Jews and Muslims and nearly four decades of Fascism.

Instead they sought communication. “Jaw-jaw is better than war-war,” Winston Churchill said, and the words ring particularly true at a time when the Catalan leadership has pushed its case to the brink of conflict, and the Spanish government has stepped right over the line into violence which, if it wasn’t lethal in its police action against a referendum on independence deemed illegal, was nonetheless brutal.

So “let’s talk” sounds like an eminently sensible response. Watching people demanding it was heart-warming. It left me feeling hopeful for once, as few political developments do.

Though I have to admit it wasn’t just the sentiment that touched me. The words themselves struck me. They awoke memories from decades ago, memories of an amusing discovery during my student days.

It may seem odd that of the two great languages of antiquity in Europe, Greek and Latin, only the former is still spoken. There is apparently no “modern Latin” as there is a “modern Greek”. That is, however, only an appearance. The only reason there’s no modern Latin is that there are, in fact, multiple modern Latins.

Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, even French are all in fact the descendants of the language spoken across the Roman Empire at its height, altered by the successive waves of incomers that have affected some regions far more than others. French, for instance, has come a long way from the original language, heavily influenced by the Germanic speech of the invaders from across the Rhine – Burgundians, Goths, and of course the Franks, who gave the country its modern name.

The Latin from which those languages developed, however, wasn’t the elevated language spoken from the Senate. “Latin’s a dead language, as dead as dead can be,” goes the schoolboy doggerel, “it killed the ancient Romans and now it’s killing me.” Even those ancient Romans realised it was far too complex a language. Pliny the Elder admitted he spoke a different language in the market than in the Senate.

The language of the marketplace was, above all, far simpler. For instance, the word for ‘to talk’, loqui (think of ‘loquacious’ or ‘eloquent’), is particularly painful. Its form is called ‘deponent’ so it looks passive when it’s actually active (so a classical Latin scholar would say ‘I have been talked’ when what he meant was ‘I have talked’).

The more sensible kind of people who would sell you a water melon or repair a broken shoe don’t speak that way. So they looked around for different words to us.

Two are particularly simple. To tell a parable – ‘parabulare’ – and to tell a fable – ‘fabulare’ – are nice, easy, first conjugation verbs that are entirely regular and therefore behave predictably. The common people chose one or other of those two to mean “to speak’ in preference to loqui

The Italians, the French and the Catalans chose ‘parabulare’, shortened to ‘parlare’ (the word in Italian), giving the Catalan ‘parlem’.

The main branch of the language in the rest of Spain chose ‘fabulare’. The Spanish have a way of replacing the initial ‘f’ by an ‘h’ – smoke, for instance, which is ‘fumo’ in Italian is ‘humo’ in Spanish. The Spanish for ‘to speak’ morphed into ‘hablar’ and hence ‘hablamos’.

The marchers in white were therefore demanding that the two parties tell some fables or some parables to each other. What they meant was that they should speak. Any of those would be great.

Isn’t it great that they chose to say it with a particularly easy word – not a derivative of the ghastly Latin ‘loqui’?

In the end, chatting to each other instead of fighting isn’t all that difficult. It just takes a simple word. And a bit of goodwill.

Catalonia: another simple solution sure to fail

In the early part of last century, the American commentator HL Mencken pointed out, “there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong”.

In Spain, elements in the troubled region of Catalonia have felt for a long time that they would be better off outside the Spanish state.

I say ‘elements’ because a great many Catalans are far from convinced that this is the right solution for their region – even if it is, in fact, a nation. Many on the left, for instance, are concerned by a separatist movement they see as xenophobic and conservative; many in the centre of the political spectrum see themselves as Spanish as well as Catalan, feel there’s no contradiction between the two and believe Catalonia would enjoy a more secure future linked with the other Spanish regions than on its own.

So which side commands a majority of Catalan opinion?

Opinion polls are only worth so much, as we have learned to our cost in numerous elections around the world. Even so, they’re about the only indication we have of where an electorate’s view stands, outside an actual election. The Centre d'Estudis d'Opinió (Centre of Opinion Studies) is a body that is run by the Catalan regional government, so one wouldn’t expect it to be biased against the views of that government, and yet even it has found a majority against independence in every poll bar one since late 2014, and in three of the last four, including both polls carried out in 2017.

The regional government is currently held by nationalists. They have decided that they wanted a referendum on independence in the hope that it would endorse their separatist views. In response, the central government in Madrid made it clear that it regarded such a referendum as illegal and ordered the Catalan government not to hold it.

Let’s pause a moment at this point.

Here’s one approach the Madrid government could have taken. It could have announced that it would not regard any referendum result from Catalonia as binding. That would have laid down that in no circumstances would a vote for independence have had any effect on the central government or lead to any change in the law concerning Catalonia.

The referendum could have gone ahead. If the opinion polls had proved accurate, the result would have been a rejection of independence, massively discrediting the separatist movement. The regional government might have fallen; the question of independence would have been off the table for many years to come.

Had the referendum delivered a vote for independence, the Spanish government would simply have confirmed that it was non-binding. They would have faced a reinvigorated separatist movement but, having made their own position powerfully clear beforehand, they would have had a strong, pre-declared position from which to build a new view of the Catalan situation resulting from the vote.

That’s a complicated solution to a difficult problem. It leaves many issues undecided, requiring the government to come up with solutions later, pragmatically, in the light of circumstances. Instead, Spain decided that it wanted a well-known, neat and plausible solution.

So it opted for repression. It sent in the police. On the day of the referendum, they were shown battling with protestors in the streets, inflicting some serious injuries. The optics, as marketing people call them, were terrible: here were Spanish police, acting on orders of the Spanish government, using often violent power to prevent people voting.

When you’re acting in the name of democracy, that’s a pretty lousy image.

Unarmed civilians in fear of the police
Not a great advert for democracy

Governments seem to like resorting to the use of force. It can be domestic, as in Catalonia, or foreign, as in Iraq, Libya or Syria. It’s always a simple solution, easy to reach for, close to hand. And it usually ends in tears, as it did in Iraq, Libya or Syria.

In Catalonia, the bloodshed on the streets will have only one effect. It will unify and galvanise the opposition to Madrid. Those who opposed Catalan independence before, will come under increased pressure to change their view. If they refuse, they will be accused of treachery, of betraying the sacrifice of the dozens who suffered injury from police violence, all in the name of Catalan freedom. Some at least who opposed separatism, will change sides and back it.

Blood shed in Catalonia:
shameful behaviour to would-be voters, a boon to the separatists

In other words, from the point of view of the Madrid government, the situation will be as would have followed a referendum result backing independence. Or, rather, far worse: whatever the result, the separatists will claim they have been cheated and will draw additional strength from the powerful emotional cohesion that the spilling of blood gives to a cause.

The Spanish government of Mariano Rajoy chose a solution, police repression, that was well-known, neat and plausible.

And, as Mencken could have told him, wrong.

The anniversary of Bannockburn: this time, there may be no winners

“The pound’s ours as much as yours,” supporters of Scottish independence keep telling me, and they’re right. And our shared pound, like our shared union, is looking shaky today, ten days from the independence referendum. That’s because on Sunday we had the first poll ever suggesting that the ‘Yes’ vote was ahead of ‘No’.

Bankers, among their many other sterling qualities, are terrified of change, any change, so the possibility of the dissolution of the union fills them with fear. And when they’re afraid, they sell. So the pound has taken a bit of a nosedive.

Bannockburn: Scots at their most fearsome,
routing the English, in 1314

The news media and conversations generally are dominated by the approaching vote. Few in England want to see the Scots go, but many of us are beginning to wonder whether they might, after all. I have to confess my position remains what it was before: were I a Scot, I’d probably want independence; as an Englishman, contemplating the prospect of losing 41 Labour MPs, and probably seeing the Conservatives encrusted onto power for another parliament or two, fills me with dread.

That being said, even if I were Scots had a vote, I’m not sure I’d vote for independence on the present terms. The Scots want to cling on to the pound – hence the mantra that it’s theirs, too – but in a currency union with the remainder of the United Kingdom. Why on Earth do they want to do that? After all, they’re in a currency union right now. Why leave the Union but maintain a currency union?

The Irish didn’t after all. They split the pound at the same time as their union with Britain. They even renamed it the punt which, as a friend recently told me on Twitter, is the only currency with the merit of rhyming with “banker.”

In any case, one of the main reasons pro-independence Scots give for their view is that they want to get away from the austerity policies being imposed on us by our Tory-led government. I can sympathise with them: they elected one Tory MP, out of the 59 Scotland sent to Westminster in 2010, and yet they got Tories dictating their politics all the same. Scots are keen on keeping the NHS free at the point of care, universities without fees, pensions higher and benefits more generous. Many of us in England want the same, so I applaud their aspiration. Like them, I lament the fact that the Tories deny us the opportunity to fulfil it.

Leaving the UK would give Scots the opportunity to pursue such policies. But not in a currency union. As Greece has discovered in its dealings with Germany, being in a currency union with a much bigger economy leaves you with little room for manoeuvre. Scotland would find itself constrained by policies, on taxation and public spending, imposed on it by the very Tories they wish to escape.

What on Earth’s the sense in that?

Meanwhile, the No campaign maintains its lacklustre approach, awaking no passion, opposing independence with arguments from an accountant’s ledger: leaving the Union might cost Scots the equivalent of a fish and chips supper a night – a painful price if you’re on the bread line (or do I mean chip line?) but hardly a rousing call to arms (“once more unto the chip shop, dear friends, once more”? I don’t think so).

And now the main Westminster parties have suddenly discovered that they can offer Scotland a great deal more autonomy, more devolved powers. The question sceptical Scots are asking is, “why didn’t you mention that before?” It does indeed look terribly like panic in response to a growing momentum for Yes.

The reality, I suspect, is that David Cameron, the most indolent Prime Minister I can remember, probably never thought of it before. He could have organised a constitutional convention a year or two ago, to consider some kind of federal arrangement within these islands. Just think. Alex Salmond would have had to take part, and look compromised, or stay out, and look curmudgeonly.

That would have put us in a strong position now: we could have been saying to the Scots, “look what’s on offer. Are you sure independence would give you more?”

But such an initiative would have involved Cameron in hard work, including tough negotiations. And he’s never shown much inclination for rolling his sleeves up.

Instead he’s left us on the back foot as we go into the referendum on the 700th anniversary of the famous victory of the Scots over the English at Bannockburn, on 18 September.

Sadly, I think on this occasion the Scots might inflict a grievous defeat not just on us, but on themselves too. A battle without winners. With little hope of gain either side of the border.