LAS LENGUAS INGLESA Y ESPAÑOLA de Delfín Carbonell

 Somewhere, long ago, I read that The Tragic Sense of Life (1921) by Miguel de Unamuno was the most important essay of the 20th century. El sentimiento trágico de la vida , 1913, is indeed a book to reckon with on our intellectual journey, and we should take a peek at it, if only because it was included -and therefore banned- in the list of best books: the Index Librorum Prohibitorum of the Catholic Church. Jorge Luis Borges said about it:  “Sospecho que la obra capital de cuantas escribió Unamuno es El sentimiento trágico de la vida . Su tema es la inmortalidad personal: mejor dicho, las vanas inmortalidades que ha imaginado el hombre, y los horrores y esperanzas que nos impone esa especulación.”  ( Textos cautivos , 1995.) Let me quote Unamuno:  “… único verdadero problema vital, del que más a las entrañas nos llega, del problema de nuestro destino individual y personal, de la inmortalidad del alma.” Miguel de Unamuno, Del sentimiento trágico de la vida en l...

  Un sufijo es un añadido a una palabra que cambia su significado. En este caso, el sufijo -o es de uso informal. Tenemos que wine es vino, pero un wino es un borrachín de vino, que se considera en inglés el peor tipo de alcohólico. Y si dumb es bobo, un dumbo es ya la caraba de la estupidez. Veamos más ejemplos de uso coloquial: dumbo – stupid person weirdo   strange person sicko – perverted or morally twisted person, sicópata cheap-o – stingy person, tacaño cheapo – bargain item or stingy person wino – slang for alcoholic (drinking wine mostly.) kiddo – child (afectuoso) preggo - pregnant female, embarazada psycho  – mentally unstable person, sicópata 

The Internet, AI, and related technologies have brought about advances that would once have seemed unimaginable. They can now generate lifelike figures—faces that blink, smile, and even flirt with the viewer—voices that appear, at first hearing, entirely real. One watches and listens with a mixture of admiration and unease: the simulation is astonishing, and yet something is off. The unease becomes clearer in the language itself. Whether in English or Spanish, what we hear is not incorrect, but curiously flattened. The intonation lacks the natural variability of real speech; the rhythm feels over-regularized; the voice seems to belong nowhere in particular. The Spanish, especially, often fails to correspond to any identifiable speech community. It is presented as “neutral,” yet comes across as disembodied—competent, but unreal. The visual element only heightens the effect. The language coach looks flawless, even coquettish, and behaves as if she were fully alive; yet her voice betray...

  Spanish has a wonderfully vivid way of calling out empty talk: cacarear y no poner huevo —literally, “to cluck and not lay an egg.” The image says it all: plenty of noise, no result. Closely related are mucho ruido y pocas nueces and írsele la fuerza a uno por la boca , both pointing to effort wasted in talk rather than action. English matches this idea with equally colorful expressions. A personal favorite is to be all hat and no cattle , evoking someone who looks the part but delivers nothing. Other equivalents include much ado about nothing , much cry and little wool , much smoke, little fire , and the blunt all mouth and no trousers . Example: David es un fanfarrón que cacarea y no pone huevo. David is a braggart— all hat and no cattle. As Fray Francisco Alvarado neatly put it in 1811: “Esto se llama en mi tierra cacarear y no poner huevo.” Different languages, same timeless observation: talk is cheap.

  I have always held that if the first 50 pages of a novel are tough going, toss it into the wastepaper basket or give it away to a friend you do not care much for. I have often heard it said that "the first 50 pages of this thriller are very complicated to read, but after that, the novel is wonderful, the best."  And who has the grit, endurance, and resilience to put up with fifty boring pages of a book, hoping that the best is yet to come. Once a bore, always a bore, I say. All this comes because my daughter, Laura Lynn, has gifted me with Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead. So far, I have read 20 pages of the autobiography of a boy in Appalachia, Demon, who is "a voice for the ages - akin to Huck Finn or Holden Caulfield," according to Beth Macy, author of Dopesick . Having read both masterpieces years ago, I see no reason to tackle a new youngster's ravings and commonplaces about his childhood and hard times. Also, having read Tobacco Road  when it wa...

In my opinion, a word that sometimes describes Spaniards linguistically is hubris : excessive confidence in one’s own abilities. Why do I say this? Because it is not uncommon to hear claims of “perfect English” that do not quite withstand scrutiny. Many people will say, in all seriousness, that they speak flawless English—or that their children do—based on rather limited experience. One hears statements such as: “My daughter speaks perfect English; she spent a month in London washing dishes,” or that someone’s command of the language is impeccable because he works as a translator at a certain firm. Yet, when the chips are down, this supposed perfection often proves less solid than advertised. The gap between confidence and actual performance can be striking. This is not to say that Spaniards are uniquely guilty of such overconfidence, but there does seem to be a tendency, at times, to equate familiarity with mastery. In that sense, “hubris” may not be entirely misplaced. Spaniards spea...