The fact remains, quite simply, that however badly I may have originally communicated them, every single point I was trying to communicate I have found support for.
This thread is about you (and Colibri and whoever) holding on to your original misunderstanding of my shamefully oversimplified explanation of a very complex and subtle situation. I take full responsibility for the misunderstanding; I take no responsibility for your holding onto it.
Oh, dear, dear, dear. A relapse to the sophomore. Plus a smiley. Time to log out while I think of how we can help you in a sustainable way.
I have rarely, in my time on this board, felt more deserving of an apology than I do right now, from Colibri. I have no recollection of ever experience such a huge gap in my understanding of a situation and the unwarranted vitriol he has flung at me. I have the utmost respect for Colibri as a knowledgeable contributor to GQ; I consider him one of that forum’s most valuable participants. But his mischaracterizations of my contributions to the thread in question, his refusal to discuss those mischaracterizations, his refusal to acknowledge the sources that I have quoted for every single point I have raised, leave me, again, bewildered. I can think of no human being on the planet, right now, that I am further from apologizing to. I’m craving to drop it, but until Colibri reads my cites and acknowledges my right to have brought those cited ideas into that thread, I’m certainly not going to apologize to him. He called me “wrong” when I very clearly was not (see cites), and he accused my of dishonesty in my discussion of the topic, merely because my clarification did not jibe with his misconstructions. Again, this surprised me extremely coming from Colibri. But I have absolutely nothing to apologize to him for.
What did you mean, then? I’m still not clear on it. Perhaps repeating yourself word for word wouldn’t work well, as your words have thus far not cleared things up.
I’m sorry that I can’t read your mind; I can only discuss what you said, not what you meant. I’m willing to make concessions to what I think it’s likely that you said - for instance, I never imagined that you meant to imply that Basque and Spanish were similar (though one reading of what you wrote could suggest that), because I assumed you knew that such a thing wasn’t true. I can’t, however, assume that when you said “‘Castilian’ is to ‘Spanish’ what ‘English’ is to ‘British’” you meant something different; I hope I have illustrated why that statement is false (though I’m ready for another round, if you wish - there are some similarities between the language situation of Great Britain and that of Spain.)
If you meant one thing and said something entirely different, you could have apologized and ducked out long ago. You could have done so, in fact, before you got the original thread locked. You could have done so before you began your traditional show of martyrdom by claiming that Colibri had accused you of being retarded, or of lying.
I did. I also explained exactly why I don’t think the wording of the Spanish Constitution is relevant to what you originally said; search my last post for the word “referrent” for that section.
I don’t doubt that that’s the commonly-used translation. I would have used it myself. Again, I already pointed out that the wording in that document cannot possibly be taken to mean that “Castilian” is technically the official language of Spain and “Spanish” is technically not.
No. None of the cites you have found have supported your main point - that is, that “Castilian” and not “Spanish” is the official language of Spain. They have explained the word choice, but they did not argue against the usage you argued against.
Your dance around rewording your original claim in a clear way was once entertaining; now I’m waiting for some new moves. I invite you once again to clearly state what you “meant” by your original post. We can discuss that. State it in the form of an assertion. Make it clear and concise. Do this explicitly if you’re going to continue this claim that you meant one thing and said another. Otherwise I simply do not find your claim plausible.
Meanwhile, admit that your claim that “Spanish” is a general term for the Spanish languages, and that it’s comparable in that sense to “British”, is false. Or else explain exactly what that sentence meant. Because I can find only two interpretations for that sentence - one is a tautology so irrelevant to the discussion that I fear you would accuse me of calling you “retarded” if I entertained it, and the other simply false.
You need to learn to take responsibility for what you say. You have an irritating tendency not to. You may start by finally making a single, clear statement of what you originally meant. So far, you have made all sorts of allusions to having communicated your point badly, but you have not given a single, simple, comprehensible summation of your original communicative intent.
Is there something we can do about him? Can we start a fund to get him the treatment he needs? How about the roger thornhill Electroshock Treatment Fund? Let’s all of us here on the SDMB do our part, okay?
Sigh. I didn’t even make that parallel up; I cribbed it from one of the sites I found googling. But it made sense to me, so I borrowed it. I meant it only in the limited context of the discussion, and as more of an analogy than as a 1:1 absolute. I was trying to draw a parallel between the word British, and its sense of including ethnically English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Manx, etc., people; and the word English, which refers–in this context–only to one of those ethnicities. This was an attempt to explain my understanding of why the word Castillian–the ethnic analog of English, in this analogy–was chosen, rather than Spanish, the political analog of British–in this context. I was trying to divorce, for a minute, for the sake of this discussion, the meaning of Spanish as a language, and its meaning as a political “umbrella” that covers more than one linguistic heritage, when it’s used to refer to the country that is home to those heritages.
I said he must think I’m retarded because he chose to believe that I thought Basque was linguistically Spanish, rather than take me at my word that I meant no such thing. Basically I meant, “Give me SOME credit.” I never meant to literally suggest that he literally suggested I was literally retarded. (I can’t believe I’m actually typing this.)
Again. I was fixated on the word “official,” so I was speaking entirely within that limited sense; to my mind the wording of the Spanish Constitution was entirely relevant, was in fact the final and only word on the subject. “Official? Here’s the legal language. Case closed.”
The official wording of the legislation that names the official language of Spain is Castilian. End of point. Of course it refers to the same language that we all refer to as Spanish. But the official name, according to the Constitution of Spain—and as far as I can tell, almost exclusively in that context, scattered pedants notwithstanding—of the official form of that language, is Castilian. You know what I thought the reaction would be? I thought it would be something along the lines of, “Huh, that’s an interesting piece of trivia.” Period. This fallout still astonishes and bewilders me.
I cannot parse this. All of those cites, and every single translation of the Constitution I can find, says that the technically correct phrase in the Constitution is, “Castilian is the official Spanish language of the State.” I was talking about terminology, I never suggested it was a different language. I know that the language referred to in the Constitution is the same language as the one pretty much everyone refers to as “Spanish.” I was referring to the official terminology. Which I distinguished from the terminology “Spanish” for the same reason that the constitution does: because “Spanish,” referring to the whole country, would claim national identity for just one language group. The constitution used the word Castilian so that the umbrella term, Spanish, would not appear to be co-opted by the speakers of one language in a country of, what, four? It was a pedantic bit of trivia; an arcana of terminology. Period.
Right; all clarifications should be assumed to be lies. Your original interpretation should be carved in stone, no further discussion is allowed. The reason I didn’t make an all-out effort to make my initial posts waterproof legalese preemptively nitpick-proof is because I assumed the discussion would continue; anything that required further discussion would be covered in due course. We would take the journey together. This halting of discussion and refusal to believe one poster’s further expansion on his initial post is mindboggling to me.
As far as restating it again, I think I did that above, in the previous paragraph. If you continue to expand my intentions for me, beyond the extremely limited and technical context I intended them for, I’m just not gonna repeat myself again. As narrow as the word “official” can go, that’s what I was addressing. A technicality of legal terminology, period. All else was attempts to explain; background. I read that part of the Wiki article (the day before, actually), and when I came across the discussion, I thought, “These guys will love this bit of arcana.” Period.
As an analogy, it addresses the distinction I was trying to draw; as to why the constitution was worded as it was. Like all analogies, it’s imperfect; there are points where the two analogs are NOT in fact similar. I was only trying to illustrate one point at which they are similar. You know, like how most people use analogies: to make a particular point, not to suggest that the two analogs are indistinguishable and interchangeable.
Explained, again, above.
Correction:
:dubious:
Latin-American here, willing to check what the fuss is all about… reads threads…
I have to say I agree that for GQ, lissiner’s posts were either not clear or misleading, the replies to Colibri were not accurate either, lissiner was confusing the issue really.
One good cite, unfortunately in Spanish, comes from the Austrian university of Insbrook:
http://culturitalia.uibk.ac.at/hispanoteca/index.htm
http://culturitalia.uibk.ac.at/hispanoteca/Lexikon%20der%20Linguistik/c/CASTELLANO%20o%20ESPAÑOL.htm
(Quotes traduced on the fly)
Titled CASTELLANO or ESPAÑOL, it does report what I do remember of the subject. The cites come from the most recent Spanish dictionaries, scholars and EFE, the premier news agency in Spain.
Relevant to this discussion, the cite does deal with the issue about the constitution. Officially, the Spanish constitution calls the language of Spain Castellano. However, the whole truth is that that decision was and remains controversial.
Marcos Marín, Francisco, writer of Curso de gramática española said that that line on the constitution “was the most horrid editing of a paragraph ever seen” The original consensus was to use Castellano y Español as synonyms of the official language, Castellano was referring to the regional dialect that gave rise to modern Spanish, it was deemed correct to use because of historical and traditional reasons, but many considered Español was the more correct term, it became Castellano only in the constitution because politics intervened: Even though Franco was dead the extreme right was still around and decided to be divisive as usual, you begin to see why it remains controversial, Using only Castellano was a way to insult not only the Basques and Catalans, but other regions of Spain that contributed to the evolution of Spanish, Castellano was the most important region, but not the only one.
So what the Royal Academy of the Spanish language and EFE do nowadays in their official business? They say that:
Pedro García Domínguez. Departamento de Español Urgente de la Agencia EFE.
-García Mouton, Pilar: Lenguas y dialectos de España. Madrid: Arco/Libros, 1994, p. 24
*Right wingers again IMO
:dubious:
Latin-American here, willing to check what the fuss is all about… reads threads…
I have to say I agree that for GQ, lissener’s posts were either not clear or misleading, the replies to **Colibri ** were not accurate either, lissener’s was confusing the issue really.
One good cite, unfortunately in Spanish, comes from the Austrian university of Insbrook:
http://culturitalia.uibk.ac.at/hispanoteca/index.htm
http://culturitalia.uibk.ac.at/hispanoteca/Lexikon%20der%20Linguistik/c/CASTELLANO%20o%20ESPAÑOL.htm
(Quotes traduced on the fly)
Titled CASTELLANO or ESPAÑOL, it does report what I do remember of the subject. The cites come from the most recent Spanish dictionaries, scholars and EFE, the premier news agency in Spain.
Relevant to this discussion, the cite does deal with the issue about the constitution. Officially, the Spanish constitution calls the language of Spain Castellano. However, the whole truth is that that decision was and remains controversial.
Marcos Marín, Francisco, writer of Curso de gramática española said that that line on the constitution “was the most horrid editing of a paragraph ever seen” The original consensus was to use Castellano y Español as synonyms of the official language, Castellano was referring to the regional dialect that gave rise to modern Spanish, it was deemed correct to use because of historical and traditional reasons, but many considered Español was the more correct term, it became Castellano only in the constitution because politics intervened: Even though Franco was dead the extreme right was still around and decided to be divisive as usual, you begin to see why it remains controversial, Using only Castellano was a way to insult not only the Basques and Catalans, but other regions of Spain that contributed to the evolution of Spanish, Castellano was the most important region, but not the only one.
So what the Royal Academy of the Spanish language and EFE do nowadays in their official business? They say that:
Pedro García Domínguez. Departamento de Español Urgente de la Agencia EFE.
-García Mouton, Pilar: Lenguas y dialectos de España. Madrid: Arco/Libros, 1994, p. 24
*Right wingers again IMO
If it worked for you, Cally, I’m willing to give it a whirl.
No, it’s definitely “Aye” (as in ¡Ay Díos mio, cómo me duele esa traducción!). In good fun, Poly and askeptic.
Lissener, are you familiar with translating from one language to another? Are you not aware that words that are cognates don’t always cover the same meanings in one language as they do another? Take for instance the word aplicar. In Spanish, it means “apply”. The related word aplicación means “application”. So clearly, in Spanish, when you’re applying for a job, you should “aplicar para un trabajo”, right? And you’d fill out an “aplicación”, of course, because if you can use apply and application like that in English, then clearly the cognate in Spanish covers the same meanings. Except it doesn’t. In Spanish, you fill out a solicitud (or instancia) in order to solicitar a job.
This is similar to your piggish insistence that Spanish castellano is exactly equal to English Castilian, when a slew of people with more than a passing familiarity with the language are telling you otherwise. They are related words, obviously, but they don’t cover the same range of meanings. In Spanish, in almost all contexts, the noun castellano is exactly equivalent to the noun español, both of which are exactly equivalent to the English noun Spanish.
Your interpretation was wrong, and your scrambling about the point is embarrassing.
GIGObuster, with all due respect, with things about a clear as Life of Brian and the Judean People’s Front, the People’s Front of Judea, etc., then you could forgive even a hated (eek! whisper it softly) right-winger to get a bit confused. Now, you might be saying that right-wingers always sow confusion whereas lefties disperse it, but I’m not quite so sure that life is quite as simple as that. There have been lefties too that have “disappeared” people. One reason human beings defy labelling is for the simple reason that the labels themselves sometimes mean very little.
I hate recommending books to people, cos it seems so patronising (esp. with the inference that they haven’t read them), but Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (kind of relevant to the thread too, which is perhaps a first for me) is brilliant, if rather devastating about the “left”, its pragmatism, its amorality and its alliances, and realpolitik generally. Not to mention his masterpiece, Animal Farm.
Of course, but Spain conquered Latin America, the Right wing I’m talking about is the fascist one that was followed as an example in many Latin-American countries.
You are right, patronizing when I came from a country where I saw what the Extreme right was capable of. And I’m also on record of disliking Communism and I already checked Animal Farm, but I hate more that the right in Latin America declared all people looking for justice communists. The majority of people looking for justice in Central America were not communist.
The use of labels again. When you have no arguments, little intellect, and no justice on your side (but unfortunately a lot of power), then name-calling is about the only option left for you. It sucks. Certainly.
I had the chance to experience the subject, if you choose to call that experience a “label” it is not me who is having a problem with history, besides, I have to insist that I’m talking mostly about the extreme right of Spain that has faded to the dust bin of history.
I think we are at cross purposes. I was referring to regimes who label enemies as “communist”, because, for example, it is (as in the US in the 50s) a sure-fire vote-winning insult.
Excalibre, I’ve taken my break from the boards, thought things over and realise that when askeptic wrote “you write in a clear concise manner that I sincerely admire”, (s)he probably meant it. Thing is, I jumped to conclusions when I read his next comment (I actually missed the first comment - just quoted - first time round and only picked up on it when I read the second comment). You see, the second comment piqued my interest, because it referred to Post 99. So I duly clicked back to the last page and saw how loong that post was. Can’t say I read it then (still haven’t, if I’m allowed to be honest). That I just couldn’t imagine someone writing “concise” about such a post without being sarcastic shows how un-American I still am, which is a good thing, I suppose, especially for you Americans.
Thank God for small favors. “Concise” doesn’t mean “one paragraph or less.” It means that you get some serious bang for your buck, that words aren’t wasted. When a post has a crapload of information, it can afford to be long.
Daniel
English, and maybe some Latin, is spoken on the moon.
This thread is especially hilarious when you read this thread first:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=370898&page=1&pp=50&highlight=lissener
“Hubristic ignorance,” indeed. Perhaps some folks - one folk, anyway - have “a little room for humility” on the subject of the Spanish language.
Well, after this topic, we may never come to a consensus on the purport of the term “Castellano” and its proper traduction, but we have definitely all had firsthand experience of the meaning of “quixotic.” 
Lissener, the point to several pages in GQ and here is not whether you were right or wrong in your assertions. Rather, it is that, faced with some people speaking from personal knowledge and experience, you pursued a nitpick to interminable lengths, digging a deeper hole for yourself, and still don’t seem to be able to get the point.
There were reasons – more and different ones than I had realized – why the Spanish Constitution used “Castellano” in preference to “Español”. And the phrase you rendered “the other Spanish languages” carries a quite different connotation from the one you put on it.
But that is secondary to what actually happened – you simply are pursuing this issue to inane lengths, and feeling or feigning an outrage that is not justified or justifiable.
You made an assertion, on the basis of a highly nuanced passage in a carefully crafted constitutional document. The inference you drew from it was, flatly and objectively, wrong. It was a plausible inference but in fact incorrect.
You need not defend it any more. Human beings, like all of us here, do make logical-but-erroneous inferences. What got you Pitted and continues to get you ridiculed is your insistence on the idea that you were in some way right.
You weren’t. You were led astray by a rather scuzzy translation of a very nuanced document. It could have happened to any of us.
Yes, “Castilian” is a literal translation of “Castellano”. In specific, largely historical contexts it is used to refer to the antecedent of modern Spanish. As I noted above, however, you’d find a lot of Aragonese, Leonese, Navarrese (like Nava, Andalucians, etc., who would take issue with the idea that the only proper name for the language they have spoken since birth is “Castellano” and that Español also references Català and Galego. Not to mention vehement Catalonians, Valencians, Galicians, Asturians, etc., who would take issue that their proud cultural language is called “Spanish.”
Scylla gave you some darn good advice. One can fuck up on the Dope. I’ve done it a number of times – given demonstrably false information on the basis of a “fact” I had mislearned as true. The proper thing to do in such a case is to gracefully apologize for having provided false information, with, if desired, an explanation of why you said what you did. Which in this case is obvious – that constitutional passage has more nuances packed into it than anything short of Leslie Fiedler dissecting Nabokov’s prose. Let go of the stone.
Oh, and just as a sidelight: I went looking for an appropriate line from Man of La Mancha to use in this context, as a quirky way to close this. Instead, I found something highly amusing: In the frame story of Miguel de Cervantes in prison within which the Don Quixote story is told in that play, what is Cervantes expecting?