DAY TEN. A BRIDGE FROM SPANISH TO GALICIAN.

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I’m writing another entry after having taken a little break from The Blog (some days of absence), in the hopes that you might have some time to catch up!

Well, so, but, anyways, without further ado...

I wish you both a Happy Sunday!  

As I recall, in the States, Sunday has always been a very full day in our household, as we are all churching very hardcore.  I’ve missed going to church while I’ve been here; I feel like going to church somewhere but at the same time am conscious of the uncertainty of the future, and as Manu interviews for jobs I wonder where we will be in the coming weeks.  I wonder if I might end up going to a church around here, if we stay here, or what!  I’m... not sure.

The future can be an uncertain thing at times... and also the present doesn’t seem to be any clearer sometimes.  Work is hard, looking for work is hard, waiting is hard, and rushing can really suck!

In the low times, I often give myself a comfort-fest of sorts, and review in my head over and over the things (specifically the language things) that I do indeed know ------ I review the Spanish verbs I know (querer means ‘to want’, cantar means ‘to sing’, hablar means ‘to speak’, escuchar means ‘to listen’!) ... and I review the nouns I know... los amigos, los libros, la música, la vida...  I find it helpful to concentrate on the things I do know, when there seems to me to be so much I don’t know.

And when I think about Spanish, it’s easy to jump from there to Galician and Portuguese.  I think about the beautiful words I know in English, which I know how to translate into beautiful Spanish words.  And Spanish words are sometimes VERY similar to their Galician counterparts.  I see relationships, connections, and I get so excited!  And so today, on this busy (for many) Sunday, I will think about connections and relationships between languages and share them with you, as you my parents share words about connections and relationships with each other at church and as Lutherans in the big wide world :)  And perhaps when you get the chance, if not today then someday, you will read what I write and enjoy it!

There’s a really cool trick for making a bridge between Spanish and Galician words.  It’s pretty cool: Sometimes a word with j+a/o/u or g+e/i in Spanish corresponds to a word with x+a/e/i/o/u in Galician!  This ‘x’ is pronounced more or less like the ‘sh’ in ‘ship’.

Note: Spanish definite articles la/las & el/los correspond to Galician definite articles a/as & o/os respectively, and they are pronounced as if they were written in Spanish.
Examples:

{{{key: Spanish in italics Galician in bold English in plain text}}}
la lógica ~ a lóxica ~ logic

lógic@ ~ lóxic@ ~ logical

la energía ~ a enerxía ~ energy

energétic@ ~ enerxétic@ ~ energetic

la magia ~ a maxia ~ magic (noun)

mágic@ ~ máxic@ ~ magic (adjective)

fingir ~ finxir ~ to pretend (note: pretender in Spanish/Galician-Portuguese means: hope, expect, try, claim; it does NOT mean to pretend!  False cognate, false friend!)

dirigir ~ dirixir ~ to lead, to direct (in Latin America manejar/dirigir is also ‘to drive’; in Spain, conducir ---which confusingly does NOT mean conduct--- is used for ‘to drive’.  If you use conducir in the Americas, people will be surprised because it sounds very formal there.  As if a Brit were to come to the States and say ‘I put on my trousers, drove the car to the petrol station and then opened the boot and took out my leftover fish and chips to eat!’)

la jirafa ~ a xirafa ~ giraffe ------ Note that in Spanish/Galician, the word is always feminine; you use another word (macha, hembra = male, female [respectively]) to clarify the sex of a giraffe.

la genética ~ a xenética ~ genetics (note that in contast to English, the word is singular in Spanish/Galician)

geológic@ ~ xeolóxic@ ~ geological

Some words aren’t quite this straightforward when translating from Spanish to Galician.  Sometimes you won’t just see a change in the consonant, but also a change in a vowel or two going from Spanish to Galician; sometimes vowels are added; sometimes the j+a/o/u or g+e/i in Spanish becomes a different consonant-plus-vowel in Galician, like Galician ll (pronounced like the ‘j’ in English ‘Joe’, which is how I advise you to pronounce ll/y in  both Spanish and Galician), or like Galician rr (pronounced as in Spanish), or even like Galician i in the form of a semivowel, pronounced like the ‘y’ in English ‘mayor’ (as in the example soia below).

la ingeniería ~ a enxeñaría ~ engineering (noun)

la caja ~ a caixa ~ box

bajar ~ baixar ~ to lower, to go down

la soja ~ a soia ~ soy (remember that the word soy means ‘I am’ in Spanish and is another false cognate!  also note, just for fun, that leche de soja means ‘soy milk’)

joven (plural: jóvenes) ~ xove (plural xoves) ~ young (can also be used as a noun to mean ‘young person’)

coger ~ coller ~ to get (also means many, many other things)

escoger ~ escoller  ~ to choose

empujar ~ empurrar ~ to push

Once upon a time when there weren’t countries in Europe so much as feudal states, the line between Galician and Portuguese hadn’t really been drawn the way it is today, and they were written the same way.  Nowadays, because of more recent historical events, Galician is written with letters that more or less correspond to the letters in Spanish.  This can be a problem for many reasons, for one because there isn’t always a clear way to indicate the presence of certain vowels in Galician (Galician has more vowels than in Spanish).  People have argued that Galician should be written as Portuguese is written, since Galician and Portuguese exist on a dialect continuum (and since that is the way things were originally done).  Nevertheless, the official orthography which you see in supermarkets / on street signs / government documents will be with the official Galician orthography, which more or less parallels that of the Spanish language.

Now you may proceed feeling slightly more educated about the world than you did before!  So long!

PEACE AND LOVE FROM GABU

DAY NINE. MÁS VERBOS CON CAMBIOS DE RAÍZ (MORE STEM-CHANGING VERBS)

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OKAY!  I wish you buena suerte (good luck) in any and all endeavors, today and all days.  Today I will jump in, do some more fun new things with more stem-changing verbs!  We are going to have fun.

So... Do you remember stem-changing verbs?  I explained them on DAY FIVE.  So far I have only reviewed e>ie stem changing verbs and o>ue verbs.  I will add the third (and final) category of stem-changing verbs, e>i stem-changing verbs.  I’ll include a link to a chart comparing the three kinds of stem-changers:

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/GCouOk34gDk/maxresdefault.jpg

In the link you will see the e>i stem-changing verb pedir, meaning to ask for.  Notice that this verb pedir translates to a phrasal verb in English, ‘to ask for’.  Pedir requires no preposition after it to communicate the idea of ‘asking for’ something.  In English the preposition ‘for’ must be added to communicate the verbal idea; ‘ask for’ does not mean ‘ask’.  The verb preguntar means ‘to ask’ as in to ask a question, and the verb pedir means ‘to ask for’, like to request something (again, with no preposition necessary after the verb to communicate the desired meaning.  

To repeat, here is how you conjugate pedir, an e>i stem-changing verb:

pedir (to ask for)

pido

pides

pide

pedimos

pedís

piden

Here are some other examples of e>i stem-changing verbs:

medir (to measure)

mido

mides

mide

medimos

medís

miden

servir (to be good, to be useful, to serve [as in a meal or a purpose])

sirvo

sirves

sirve

servimos

servís

sirven

vestir (to dress, to wear [though also llevar can mean ‘to carry, to wear’])

visto

vistes

viste

vestimos

vestís

visten

And here is an example of a very useful verb which is an e>i stem-changer, but has a yo-form that is irregular:

decir (to say, to tell)

digo

dices

dice

decimos

decís

dicen

The verb seguir (to follow, to continue) is an e>i stem-changing verb, but the ‘u’ in the verb is only preserved when the verb ending begins with e/i, in keeping with the spelling rules I have already explained (the ‘u’ is needed in cases where e/i follows, in order to preserve that hard G sound, which is present in all forms of this verb).  Here is the conjugation for seguir:

sigo

sigues

sigue

seguimos

seguís

siguen

So you will notice *siguo is not a thing because the ‘u’ is not necessary to preserve the hard G sound (and indeed, the ‘u’ would add an extra vowel sound).  Other forms of the verb seguir, which we will learn about later, also omit the ‘u’ due to its not being necessary to preserve that hard G sound; examples: siga, sigan, sigamos, and more.

In the following webpage (http://www.spanishdict.com/conjugate/seguir) you can see an illustration of this point about the appearance (or disappearance) of the ‘u’ to preserve the hard G sound in seguir; you will notice that the irregularities of this verb (both the stem-changing situations in this verb, and situations when the ‘u’ is dropped because it is not necessary to preserve the hard G sound) are in RED.

Hope you have enjoyed today’s lesson!  See you next time!

DAY EIGHT. EN LA CAFETERÍA (AT THE CAFÉ)

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The other day I found myself in a cafetería (a café) and I thought I might teach you some words for being in a cafetería and trying to order a café (a coffee) and things like that!

Here in Spain, the use of ‘formal you’ Ud. (usted) is restricted to speaking with elders or the president, something really formal.  Even when at a café you can use the informal tú with your server and no pasa nada (‘nothing’s wrong’, literally ‘nothing happens’).  You are expected to be quite informal with the barista.  You can say ¿Me pones un café solo?  (‘Could I get a shot of esperesso?’, literally ‘will you put me a single coffee?’).  You can even cut right to the chase and say un café solo, just the thing you want, and have done with it.  You can add por favor afterwards if you want, but I’d say people say please here less often than we do.  It doesn’t seem as rude or blunt as it might in English to not to include it.

In repsonse to your request the server will probably say vale which means ‘okay’.  Maybe you’ll ask for un cruasán or una magdalena (a croissant or a muffin) ... you can ask in the same way as you asked for the espresso: ¿Me pones un cruasán?  ¿Me pones una magdalena?  Note that you can write croissant in Spanish, written as they write it in French (and indeed, as they write the word in English) or you might find it written as cruasán.  Whether you find the word written like croissant or cruasán in Spanish, you pronounce the word like cruasán in Spanish.

El dinero is ‘money’.  La cena is ‘dinner’, as in, the evening meal.  Though dinero looks a lot like the English word ‘dinner’, I repeat, it means ‘money.

People eat dinner very late here, as you have been told many times before.  You might pay with la tarjeta de débito or la tarjeta de crédito (‘debit card’ or ‘credit card’).  If you’re just buying a coffee at a café, you’re likely to be asked for dinero en efectivo, ‘cash’, and paying with a card would be reserved for when eating at a sit-down place.  In general, credit cards are less universally used here than in the United States, particularly outside of the big cities like Madrid and Barcelona.

In Spanish, we have individual verbs for the eating of meals, so

cenar = to eat dinner

almorzar = to eat lunch

desayunar = to eat breakfast  ------ the word comes from des (dis) + ayunar (to fast), along similar lines to the word ‘breakfast’ in English.

Here are the nouns for the meals:

la cena = dinner

el almuerzo = lunch

el desayuno = breakfast

When you conjugate the verbs for the eating of meals (mentioned above) you will notice that some forms of the verbs are identical to the noun: ella/élle/él/Ud. cena & la cena; yo almuerzo & el almuerzo; yo desayuno & el desayuno.  And as I have already stated, often the subject pronoun is omitted from the verb in Spanish, when the subject is already clear.  When I say yo desayuno I could just as easily say desayuno and the yo is understood.  SO you will notice that desayuno can mean ‘I eat breakfast’ as well as the noun ‘breakfast’.  You simply have to deduce (based on context) whether the word desayuno is the verb form or the noun.

La moneda is ‘coin’ and el cambio is ‘change’ (it can mean change in the sense of a thing that has become different OR money exchange, just the word ‘change’ in English).  El billete is a bill, like a dollar bill or a euro note or whatever the case may be.  La cuenta is the check, like what you get at the end of the meal when you’re reading to pay.  La cuenta, por favor, you can say.  El cheque, which looks like the English word check, means check only as in the check that you receive when you get paid by your employer or the check your grandparents give you for Easter or a birthday!

You can (and indeed, are advised to) tell a server hasta luego (‘see you later’, literally ‘until later’) when you are leaving a café even if you are fairly certain you’ll never see them again. Adiós, ‘goodbye’, is a little bit more formal feeling, and may carry a greater deal of finality, like ‘farewell’ or ‘goodbye forever’.  In Brazilian Portuguese, the equivalent adeus (pronounced more or less as if written in Spanish except with the stress on the second syllable -- Portuguese has different accent mark rules than in Spanish!!) pretty much always means ‘goodbye forever, we shall tragically never meet again’ and carries a very dramatic connotation in Brazilian Portuguese.  In Iberian Portuguese (as in, Portuguese spoken in Portugal) adeus is a simple ‘bye’, without such drama (my Brazilian Portuguese teacher would say ‘people in Portugal say adeus because, well, they are very dramatic there’ haha).  Até logo (‘ah-TAY LO-goo) is ‘see you later’ in Portuguese and also serves as the regular way to say ‘goodbye’ in Brazilian Portuguese.

Impress your Galician relatives-in-law by saying ata logo, which is ‘see you later’ in Galician.  Hasta luego (Sp.) ~ Ata logo (Gal.) ~ Até logo (Port.) = See you later!

See you later and take care :) love to parents from gabu :)