In his column on vulgarities and obscenities in other languages than English Cecil gives the Dutch example: “Krijg de mazelen” (“get the measles”). That is rather a mild way of putting it. In Dutch, people can wish every imaginable disease on each other. As a Dutchman I had never heard the one about the measles, but I have heard cholera, typhoid fever and cancer wished upon people, not excluding myself. Furthermore, where an English speaking person would use a colloquial word for excrement, we tend to use the vulgar word for a lady’s private parts, “kut”. I thought this might be of interest to the teeming millions.
While I have basically no familiarity with it, Russian мат approaches being a language unto itself. It’s based on a few naughty words, which are basically the same as English ones–cock, cunt, fuck, whore.
I’ve always enjoyed the following anecdote, quoted from Wikipedia:
Not only would most Spanish people say they ARE NOT the same, they would also say there’s no such language as “Spanish”
The actual name for what we call spanish is Castellano, the language of Castilla y Leon, the dominant province.
Catalan is a completely distinct language, albeit similar.
One could say that politically speaking, they are even more different, cos the Catalans fought and died to be independent from Madrid. They’ve gained some autonomy and hold some political power because they are sometimes the deciding voice in parliament.
their position is almost exactly like the Scots in GB, rich, small, some autonomy, and occasional talk of independence.
If Barcelona wins a football match, it’s just half about sports, the other is half about politics and showing independence.
Unless he changed it since you wrote that, the confusion might be all yours, since I see no evidence of that, actually. Care to point where it confuses the two?
Not only would most Spanish people say they ARE NOT the same, they would also say there’s no such language as “Spanish”
The actual name for what we call Spanish is Castellano, the language of Castilla y Leon, the dominant province.
Catalan is a completely distinct language, albeit similar.
One could say that politically speaking, they are even more different, cos the Catalans fought and died to be independent from Madrid. They’ve gained some autonomy and hold some political power because they are sometimes the deciding voice in parliament.
their position is almost exactly like the Scots in GB, rich, small, some autonomy, and occasional talk of independence.
If Barcelona wins a football match, it’s just half about sports, the other is half about politics and showing independence.
First time through, I was mildly confused by this part:
Underlining added for emphasis. It appeared to be saying that example was a statement in Spanish, then labeled it Catalan. Of course the next example is Swahili, which is not Spanish, so there you go. He says Spanish is champ, but then doesn’t give any examples from Spanish. (Okay, one, from Argentina.)
Since I have never once visited the Peninsula, and since I don’t speak a word of either, I think the fact that I can still distinguish them at sight makes it pretty clear that they’re not the same language.
Except that Castellano is “Castillian” in English. But, in English, or at least in the USA, “Castillian” normally means old-world Spanish, as opposed to new-world Spanish, and, in fact, is normally pretty much equivalent to seseo (the characteristic replacement of /s/ by /θ/). Linguists, of course, use “Castillian” differently, to mean the speech of Castile, as opposed to Leonese, Aragonese, Gallician, etc.. But I don’t know any English speaker who uses “Castillian” to mean not-Catalan.
I admit that the situation is horribly confused. But, heck, most Americans don’t even know that Catalan exists. A good many Americans, after all, don’t even seem to know that Portuguese exists.
hmmm, it’s biblical, no wonder they kept the bad lingo out it.
and
from Arabic? Really? So … either prissy Hebrew had to borrow words from roughneck Arabic, or it was too stupid to borrow swearwords from the OTHER dozens of languages it came into contact with before Arabic …
like Yiddish, Franko, French, Russian etc etc.
color me not convinced at all.
yep, sounds just as st… delightfully naive!
take it as a rule of thumb that a language develops swear words FIRST.
But not in Cataluyna, unless you have a dead wish.
j.k.!
But Catalan and Galician scholars call them Iberian languages, anything, just to avoid calling themselves anything Spanish. Because that means accepting subjugation, which they in general, do not.
it’s not that confused, there are just many languages, who were separated by geographical distances. At that time, 100 miles meant an almost insurmountable barrier. Some have “come together” under a common dominant denominator, Castile is to Spain what England is to Britain and for example Holland is to the Netherlands (note the plural s) etc etc.
All these countries had slightly different languages, cos the technology at that time didn’t allow them to be unified, geographical distances were too big. They coalesced into a common language, also for political reasons.
If the present slide into ignorance in America keeps up, the different regions will lose contact with each other and then, in a thousand years, there will be several distinct languages, like TexMex, Floridian, New England English and Alaskoan
whole forests have disappeared to describe what a good many Americans don’t know. Many non-Americans have wondered about this seeming paradox: how could Americans come to dominate the world when they seem to be so ignorant?
The answer is that for dominance, you don’t need to be smart, you need loads of oil and the destruction of the industrial infra structure of your near competitors, like Germany, England and Japan …
