LAS LENGUAS INGLESA Y ESPAÑOLA de Delfín Carbonell

Just as we cannot watch two different television channels at the same time, we should not mix languages indiscriminately. When speaking Spanish, pretend it is the only language at your command. If you are talking to a Mexican, for instance, she should have no reason to guess—or even suspect—that you speak English. To me, this is true bilingualism. Never take the easy way out and dip into English simply because you cannot immediately find the Spanish expression you need. Keep your languages at bay and adhere to my made-up motto: “A place for every language and every language in its place.” Keep a tight rein on your linguistic “crutches” and fillers in both languages. They can be a dead giveaway of the language—or even the cultures—you have acquired. Pretend you are a spy speaking English: you cannot give yourself away by suddenly introducing Spanish into your speech. And vice versa. A now-deceased neighbor of mine in Pittsburgh used to drive me to despair by switching from one language ...

In the Preface to my A Dictionary of Proverbs, English and Spanish (Serbal, 1996, Barron's Educational, 1998), I wrote that "They (proverbs) form an important part of the oral background of the English and Spanish peoples. Without a knowledge of proverbs and sayings, a deep understanding of their language and culture will always be incomplete." One reviewer stated that I was wrong and that proverbs are not necessarily important in language. 30 years later, I can repeat what I wrote then and further state that they are an essential part of language phraseology and lore. I am speaking of attaining a proficient command of language. Let me urge you to acquire as many as you possibly can in both languages. For example: al buen callar llaman Sancho (santo) Silence is golden; speech is silver, silence is gold(en) — “… byen se le devyera menbrar que a buen callar llaman Sancho.” Alfonso Martínez de Toledo, Arcipreste de Talavera (Corbacho) , 1438 . España. || “… mi secreto p...

 I met Silvano Corrêa at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, when we were both undergraduates in the late 1950s. Born in Brazil and now living in São Paulo , Silvano has been my friend for almost seventy years. I have always regarded him as an honest, upright, optimistic, idealistic, and God-fearing man. I have had a few disappointments in friendship over the years, but with Silvano, I have always felt safe. Some time ago, he sent me, in book form, a collection of letters he had written to Brazilian newspapers, decrying the state of affairs in his country and in the world at large. Minhas Cartas, expressões de um idealista is a compilation of his views on government, politics, and society in general. Silvano has now published his memoirs, Seven Lives of Silvano: one story, seven ways, just one purpose (Amazon Books, 2026), in which he recounts his different stays in Brazil and the United States. This is, to my mind, a fine memoir of a bilingual and bicultural man and ...

In learning a second language, our aim should be to attain the highest possible level of proficiency. We should cultivate all five skills: speaking , listening , pronunciation , reading , and writing . Our aspirations should be limitless. Yet we often take our mother tongue for granted, assuming we command it fully when in fact we may not. At times, we even strive so earnestly to master a new language that we begin to neglect our first means of communication. True bilingualism means handling both languages at an equal level. I invite you to read my article on this subject in VivaFifty .

  BILINGUAL BICULTURAL   In the early fifties, as a young boy, I crossed the Atlantic aboard a TWA Super Constellation propeller airplane from Madrid. After many hours, we landed at Idlewild Airport in New York. A tallish, thin, blond young boy reached America and immediately felt at home. “This is home at last”, I said to myself, and thus started my love affair with this country. What was it about Idlewild, the Greyhound bus that took me to Pittsburgh, a nine-hour ride, the people around me… It was a feeling of contentedness, of a certain joy, of adventure and emotion. All seemed new, fresh, and different, so different from my adopted city of Madrid, where I have never truly felt at home to this day. I had my first Coke, my second Coke, my third Coke during that long trip through Pennsylvania to Pittsburgh, the Smokey City, as it was then called. I was better off than most because I spoke English and was able to understand and make myself understood to the astonishmen...

  Some think of me as a "criticón", a nitpicker, a faultfinder, who relishes criticizing others all the time on grammar, syntax, spelling, and... pronunciation. Nothing farther from the truth, believe me. To prove it, I recently watched on Spanish TV (rtve), commenting on the Ukraine war and Trump's antics, a certain Robin Niblett, speaking in educated, easy-to-understand, clear, and well-pronounced Spanish. I rushed to check up on him because the name sounded British. Sure enough! Dr. Sir Robin Christian Howard Niblett, KCMG, Distinguished Fellow at Chatham House, BA, MA, Ph.D., is a British specialist in international relations. You should have heard him speak in flawless and phonetically perfect Spanish. J.H. Elliott, the historian, spoke good Spanish but with a pronounced English accent. Ian Gibson's Spanish pronunciation is a laugh after nearly 60 years of residence in  Spain, but Dr. Niblett left me open-mouthed and wordless. Tom Burns and Felipe Fernández-Armes...

  Aprender un idioma y dominarlo bien, con soltura y a todos los niveles, incluso el propio no es cuestión baladí. Pero ya nos decía Spinoza que todo lo bueno es difícil de conseguir. De no ser así, todos seríamos políglotas. Pero, como siempre, muchos son los llamados y pocos los elegidos... simplemente porque unos hacen el esfuerzo y otros, la mayoría, no se molestan. Aprender un idioma bien, incluso el propio, es posible... y nos abre las puertas a nuevas maneras de pensar, de acceder a otras culturas, a otras aventuras educativas o espirituales. La inversión de tiempo vale la pena. Hagamos ese esfuerzo todos y dediquemos unos minutos cada día a mejorar y adquirir más francés, inglés, castellano, urdu... el idioma que sea. Saber dos idiomas redobla nuestras posibilidades. Hablar tres las triplica. ¿Vamos a intentarlo? Ánimo.

  Gracias a Laura Carbonell, estoy leyendo "Letters", de Oliver Sacks (Alfred A. Knopf, 2024), editadas por su secretaria de toda la vida Kate Edgard. Sigo a este neurólogo desde que leí "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat", en 1985, y leo y releo con mucha frecuencia los libros que poseo de él, particularmente "On the Move" (2015) y "Gratitud" (2015). Leo esta correspondencia a trompicones, sin orden ni concierto, según me da. Hoy he abierto la página 479 con la carta a una madre oyente de un hijo sordo. El niño tiene que aprender el lenguaje de signos, que es otro idioma (recordemos que hay lengua de signos inglesa, estadounidense, española, mexicana...) y entresaco: "... there should be really good first language - given this, everything else can follow. Bilingualism, trilingualism, good intellectual development. The overwhelming danger is NOT achieving a good first language..." Of course, Sacks is referring to sign language but ...

  In The Anatomist , Bill Hayes defines comparative anatomy as "the study of the similarities and differences in the structure of living things." Comparative literature is the study of two or more different literatures. Comparative phraseology is the vetting of the structures of idiomatic expressions in two languages and their meaning. "Sell a bill of goods" is to deceive, swindle, or take unfair advantage of someone. "Dar gato por liebre" is defined in Spanish as engañar, hacer pasar una cosa mala por mejor , similar to "darla con queso",  engañar o estafar a alguien . Comparative phraseology finds that the idiomatic expressions in both languages have the same meaning although the words may differ in structure and literal meaning.  

I know that perfection in language is an idle fancy, but I also have my foibles and quirks, and since early childhood, I have been collecting words and phrases and different pronunciations. I am still at it 24/7, as they say now. As far as language is concerned (or otherwise) I am no minimalist! I never have enough and I always want more. Aside from reading aloud, and moving my lips and tongue, I also close the day listening to English or Spanish in bed until grogginess overcomes me. And I have paper and pen in hand to write down whatever expression tickles me, lest I cannot recall it in the morning. Language learning is no walk in the park, at least for me, and we must toil at it constantly.   

Elena Lappin´s memoir What Language Do I Dream In , and John Gallagher´s review of it in The Guardian , are both disappointing. I have read the book because of my interest in languages and bilingualism only to find an autobiography of a person and her family who have had a thirst for travel. From Russia to Czechoslovakia, then to Germany and Israel, to continue to Canada, the US, and finally, to the UK. We are told about grandparents, parents, and relatives, with side escapades to odd people of many nationalities. In passing, Ms Lappin mentions the languages she has been exposed to in her wondering, in her world-trotting. All of us can write an autobiography. Lappin´s experiences might be of interest to her family and offspring but to nobody else. Her insights into languages show that although she speaks several languages, she´s no linguist. She says:  " To this day, my brother owes his perfect Russian accent to his extended stay in Moscow at the age of almost two." Really? A...

  Cada idioma, cada cultura, tiene sus grandes literatos, científicos, descubridores, artistas, políticos, que son desconocidos en otras culturas. El reto de los bilingües es el de estar en contacto y al día de quien es quién, en nuestro caso, en español e inglés. Toda persona culta en los Estadaos Unidos sabe perfectamente quién es Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr , de quien los monolingües hispanos no han oído hablar. Ser culto ya es difícil, ser culto en dos idiomas lo es mucho más porque exige el doble de tiempo y el doble de esfuerzo. Pero vale la pena. Hablar dos idiomas exige dominar dos culturas. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809-1894) escribió Autocrat of the Breakfast Table y nos dijo: "Beware how to take hope from any human being." "The great thing in this world is not so much where you stand, as in what direction you are moving." "Poverty is evidence of limited capacity." "All men want to reach old age and grumble when they get it."

  No ser de recibo Be beyond (outside) the pale, unacceptable, unsatisfactory Lo que dice usted sobre las mujeres no es de recibo What you say about women is beyond  the pale — “Lo que no es de recibo es sentarse por primera vez a oír hablar de un tema y dar tu conformidad a un comunicado para los medios de difusión que ya está preparado de antemano sin nuestra intervención...” Jesús Cacho, Asalto al poder , 1988. Esp. Beyond (outside) the pale No ser de recibo, pasarse de la raya, pasarse dos (cuatro) pueblos Your behavior is simply beyond the pale Su comportamiento de usted no es de recibo — “They were now missioners to those who stand outside the pale of Church and Chapel.” James Munson, The Nonconformists , 1991. UK. || “And if that were not bad enough, things were about to go beyond the pale.” Daily Star, 23 Oct., 2023. UK.

When higher stages of language learning are reached, we encounter hurdles we never foresaw at the beginning, when we were dealing with grammatical nuances and syntactical riddles. The lexical uses in the two languages differ at times, and we apply the solutions given by our first language. However, bilinguals have the challenge of managing the uses of Spanish and English. No small feat. Let me give you an example: Pull, "tirar, jalar" in Spanish, as in He pulled the trigger . In Spanish, however, the verb "apretar" to tighten, or press, is used: apretó el gatillo . Squeeze is also used, although much less. I have found 10,354 examples of pulled the trigger and only 229 of squeezed the trigger .      

Notwithstanding some Catalans' yearnings for independence from Spain, the fact that all of them are bilingual in Catalan and Spanish is a godsend many other inhabitants in the Peninsula do not have. They need to appreciate that bilingualism is a gift that few people possess. Those rabid Catalanists would erase Spanish from the face of the Catalonia map, condemning the population to be monolingual in a language -Catalan- that, with all due respect, does not have the widespread importance Spanish has in world communication. This shows that politics and personal interests blind politicians who are willing to sacrifice the intellectual future of a population in order to achieve their narrow monetary and power objectives. Being able to speak both Catalan and Spanish is an intellectual gift the rest of Spaniards do not possess. When nationalism and language mix, language is always the loser and it is used as a weapon to divide, not to reconcile.   

  If you are intrigued, then check Huffpost.US with link below. Copy and paste: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/what-does-being-bilingual_b_10630424

  We were spending the summer at a gated community, outside the city, and my son Oscar was about four years old. Children had the run of the place and were having a blast. He had made many friends his age, and spent all day cycling, swimming, and playing soccer... We were new to the place that year. One day I was strolling along and saw Oscar with some buddies. I approached the circle and said something to him in ENGLISH, the language I have communicated with my children with since they were born. All the children stared at me wide-eyed. Their eyes grew even wider when they heard him answer in what, for them at that time, was a strange language. And for the first time in his life, Oscar realized that speaking two languages at home was not “normal” and that the rest of the families spoke only one. Up to that point in his short life, he had not realized that bilingual families were not the norm. After this incident, Oscar stopped talking to me in English. He did not enjoy being “...

Heraclitus of Ephesus, the Greek man of wisdom who lived five hundred years before Christ, said, observing nature, “everything is in a state of flux”, meaning that everything is forever changing and that no man ever steps in the same river twice because the water is ever flowing. The nature of the universe is change, movement, development and nothing is static.   Language cannot escape the dictum of the Greek philosopher in its natural change and evolution. However, the laws of linguistic change are often stymied by outside forces and circumstances that impede the inherent development of language.   When two tongues live together and share the same territory inhabited by the same people, a new phenomenon of change occurs in phonology, grammar and vocabulary. This factor is unavoidable and difficult to deal with or even halt. The use of two languages in daily social intercourse poses challenges that one-language societies do not have or even understand.   Since 1898 ...

The English version of the title may have thrown you astray to think that this post deals with the meaning of what we all call "life." The Spanish version, however, sets things right because there is no definite article. I mean to inquire into the meaning of the word "life" when we say that "life is difficult," for instance. Bilinguals have the upper hand over monolinguals in many ways, but also in parallel lexicography. We are able to compare definitions and see the extent to which they differ from language to language.  "Facultad para crecer, renovar la propia sustancia, reproducirse, etc. que tienen los animales y las plants." Dicc. de María Moliner. "The sum of the distinguishing phenomena of organisms, esp. metabolism, growth, reproduction, and adaptation to environment." So says The Random House Dictionary .  When we seek the meaning of a word in one language, we can search for its meaning in the other language, thus getting a bet...

I dedicate my new book FRASEOLOGÍA ESPAÑOL-INGLÉS ( Editatum , October 2022) to my readers: "Based on the conceit that all brains are created equal, this booklet sets forth to explore the similarities in the phraseological discourse in languages, particularly in Spanish-English, and aims to prove that, as a result, equivalent parallel expressions in both languages can always be found. It claims further that there´s always a bilingual solution to every phrase and idiom. To paraphrase Dr. Samuel Johnson: There´s no language problem the mind of man has set, that the mind of man cannot solve. And so, I am taking the liberty of dedicating this book to all those who share my views, interest, and passion for language study in general and bilingualism in particular. I am especially addressing this to you, reader, and wish to thank you for your interest and eagerness to improve your language skills. Never falter, and keep on trucking!"