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immigration

2012-05-04 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Cinco de Mayo not the ‘real’ Mexican national day?

The sense of shared identity that binds an immigrant group together in its adopted home is no mere transplanting of old-country customs.  It involves creativity and innovation—and a dual process of celebrating ancestral ties while affirming group emergence into the fabric of life in the new country.

Calabrians, Sicilians, Tuscans, Abruzzians and other immigrants from the Italian Peninsula began to draw together in the late-19th-century U.S., just when a unified ‘Italy’ was being born.  Columbus Day, Oct. 12 (also, later, ‘Día de la Raza’ or ‘Day of the Hispanic/Latino People’) grew by the 20th century into an Italian-American affirmation.  For the Irish, whose history of mass immigration here is a half-century older, St. Patrick’s (St. Paddy’s) Day plays a similar role, as has Oktoberfest for German-Americans.

So, curious Americans’ periodic discovery that Cinco de Mayo –the Fifth of May—isn’t the ‘real’ Mexican national holiday (that would be Independence Day, Sep. 16), somewhat misses the point of the day: the affirmation of Mexicanness in a new land.

It commemorates not Mexico’s winning of independence from Spain (1821) but a more complex historical moment: Liberals’ 1862 military victory in the Battle of Puebla over French invaders and their Conservative allies.  Starting in the mid-1840s, Mexico was wracked by a sequence of horrors unimaginable to most Americans—half of national territory lost in the U.S.-Mexican War; prolonged civil war triggered by the Liberals’ (most famously Benito Juárez’s) anti-clerical, anti-aristocratic reforms; a British-French-Spanish triple invasion, ostensibly to collect debts from a land bled dry by war; and finally a full-blown French occupation in alliance with the civil war’s defeated Conservatives.

The Mexican triumph at Puebla, against a superior French force double in size, forms an imperfect and contradictory part of the larger historical story.  Ironies abound in its celebration.  For one thing, after Puebla the French actually prevailed, ruling Mexico for three years.  Also, a key figure at Puebla, young Gen. Porfirio Díaz, later became a dictatorial president whose endless, corrupt reelections eventually triggered the Mexican Revolution.

There are more ironies: the French had long dreamed of achieving footholds in former Spanish America.  In the 1830s, geographer Michel Chevalier coined the term ‘Latin America’—a completely novel invention designed to make France’s ambitions in the Americas sound natural and logical. It caught on among many newly-independent Mexicans, Argentines, Chileans, etc.,  eagerly seeking identities separate from Spain.  Moreover, the ruler Napoleon III sent to take the Mexican throne, Maximilian, was a naïve and ill-starred monarch who proved too liberal for the Conservatives, and awkwardly solicitous of Indian and mestizo peasants’ rights.  Eventually executed, he and his wife (haunted by madness during her widowhood) became tragic, romantic figures with a contradictory place in Mexican memory.

So Cinco de Mayo is not Mexico’s national holiday, not the commemoration of independence from Spain, nor of definitive victory against the French.  But Puebla preserves the memory of an unexpected victory after a generation of endless invasion, war, and loss.  As such, it has become a forum for expression of the new and continually evolving ways of being, and proudly feeling, Mexican in the United States—as well as an opportunity, partly superficial and commercial to be sure, for Americans to interact with Mexican culture.  Literally hundreds of local celebrations across the U.S. mark the day.

In an era when Mexico’s sons and daughters here face twin scourges of economic crisis and political vulnerability unlike any in living memory , it’s possible that Cinco de Mayo has never been quite as important as it is today.

Pablo Julián Davis

Pablo J. Davis, Ph.D., CT, received his graduate training in Latin American History at Columbia and Johns Hopkins Universities and a Certificate from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina.  He is Principal and Owner of Interfluency Translation+Culture, delivering seamless, world-class translation and interpreting to the legal community and other professions, as well as cultural awareness training.

Filed Under: Interflows Language+Culture Blog Tagged With: "Pablo J. Davis", Cinco, Cinco de Mayo, Columbus Day, comparative, comparison, cultura, culture, Davis, German, German-American, Hispanic, Hispano, history, holidays, identity, immigrants, immigration, Interfluency, Irish, Irish-American, Italian, Italian-American, Italy, Julián, Latin, Latino, Mayo, Memphis, Mexican, Mexican-American, Mexico, Oktoberfest, Pablo, Pablo Julián Davis, St. Paddy's, St. Patrick's Day, States, traducción, traductor, translation, translator, United, United States, USA

2012-01-12 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

The funny Spanish letter with the squiggle on top

January is, of course, the month when New Year’s greetings are exchanged: “Happy New Year” in English, Feliz Año Nuevo en español. The Spanish words for “year” and for the language itself both contain the single most readily-identifiable visible marker of the Spanish language: the letter ñ, pronounced ‘EN-yeh’.  Ñ is a letter, but so much more: its cultural significance is great and seems only to be growing.

The ‘ny’ in English ‘canyon’ is the sound this letter represents. Indeed, that word comes from the Spanish cañón which can mean ‘canyon’ (like El Gran Cañón del Colorado, The Grand Canyon) or ‘cannon’ (the weapon). The job the single letter ñ does to represent the ‘ny’ sound in Spanish is done by two letters in other languages: in Italian and French by gn, and in Portuguese by nh, for instance. So lasagna is spelled lasanha in Rio de Janeiro and Lisbon, but lasaña in Caracas and Buenos Aires.

So powerful is this letter (which many non-Spanish speakers think of as an ‘N with a little squiggle on top’) as a marker of Spanish-ness that one often hears English speakers add it to Spanish words that actually have only a simple ‘N’. For instance, the habanero pepper is often pronounced in English as if it were habañero.  This sort of thing happens a lot in language and is known as ‘hyper-correction’: the speaker makes an extra effort to be correct, and overdoes it.  It’s the same reason people sometimes say “They sent a letter to he and I.”

The familiarity of ñ to English speakers, especially in the United States, is reinforced by its presence in a number of words in common use: piñata, jalapeño, mañana, niño, España, español, and others.

Extract from Antonio de Nebrija’s pioneering grammar of the Spanish language, published in 1492, a year of some significance in Spanish, and world, history

But where did this peculiar letter come from?  Historical linguists  tell us that in the Middle Ages, Spanish words originating in Latin that had a double n came to be pronounced ‘ny’. The phonetic term for this is ‘palatalization’: rather than the tip of the tongue touching the front of the palate, at the edge of the teeth, the tongue is brought all the way up to the palate, or roof of the mouth, and a larger section of the tongue touches the palate.  Thus, what had been an ‘n’ sound becomes ‘ny’. That is one part of the story—the sound.

And sound seems to be an important part of ñ‘s appeal. Some linguists of Spanish believe that the palatalization ofn is a strong phonetic tendency in infancy, which has led to a series of words beginning with ñ and having a childish (or sometimes, by extension, foolish) connotation. Some examples: ñoño (silly, insipid), ñoñería (foolishness),ñaña (nursemaid, big sister), ñato (snub-nosed, or simply a child), ñiquiñaque (person or thing of little value).  Other linguists have pointed to the ñ sound as a marker of the Spanish language’s expansion to the Americas—and the impact of the native languages of the Americas on it.  Words like ñañdú (an ostrich-like bird of South America) andñañdubay (a hardwood) come from the Guaraní.  Others testify to African influence: ñame (yam) and ñánigo(member of the Abakuá male secret societies of African origin), while still others come from elsewhere: ñoqui is simply Hispanized phonetics for Italian gnocchi.

Besides sound, the other part of the story comes to us from paleographers, who study ancient writing: parchment, the paper of its day, was very expensive; to save space, writers or copyists of manuscripts placed one n—a smaller one—atop the other. So, in truth, the ‘single’ letter ñ was born as the fusion of two n‘s. (The ampersand, not unique to Spanish, was similarly born as a digraph, or combination of two letters: Latin et, meaning ‘and’.)

Throughout the modern history of the language, then, ñ has been a distinctive, instantly recognizable feature of Spanish writing and type: the fifteenth letter of the alphabet (for centuries it was the sixteenth, as the consonant combination ch, between c and d, was fourth; the reform of the year 2010 eliminated ch, as well as ll, as separate letters of the alphabet).

The age of the computer and the Internet brought with it a serious challenge to the survival of ñ, and revealed perhaps unsuspected depths of feeling towards it among Spanish speakers.  In the early 1990s, unease arose in Spain over the exporting to that country of computer keyboards without the ñ (as well as the inverted marks that are used to open exclamations or questions).  When the Spanish Government openly expressed its distress and raised the possibility of requiring computers sold in Spain to have an ñ key, the European Community cried “Foul!” and alleged protectionism.

At the same time, a wave of emotional defenses of ñ began to surge throughout the Spanish-speaking world.  Famously, Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez lashed out at the “arrogance” and “abuse” in the drive to eliminate ñ for reasons of mere “commercial convenience.” The Argentine poet María Elena Walsh, beloved composer of children’s music, also defended  “this letter that is ours, this letter with its little hood, something that might seem insignificant, but is less ñoño [silly] than it might seem . . . The ñ is people.”  Somehow ñ became a symbol—the symbol—of  what was distinctive and unique about the Spanish language and the cultures that use it.

Finally, Spain passed a law in 1993 protecting ñ by requiring computer keyboards sold in the country to include it; invoking the Maastricht Treaty’s of cultural differences.  Luis Durán Rojo, from Peru, tells this story engagingly.  Of course, millions of Spanish speakers living outside of Spain and Latin America use laptops and other devices that lack an ñ key, and are not aware of how to produce that character (in Word, you press Control and Shift together, then the tilde key, then the letter n).  The Spanish of emails, tweets, and instant messages is full of attempts to render the sound either phonetically (anio and the much less common anyo), Portuguese style (anho),  or in Italian orthography (agno) for año. It is not uncommon to see ‘Feliz Ano Nuevo’—either an honest mistake by English speakers or a slightly off-color joke by hispanohablantes, as without the ñ‘s tilde it literally means ‘Happy New Anus’.

If the outcry over a ‘mere’ letter of the alphabet seems a bit silly, consider the reaction in the U.S. to the Metric Conversion Act of 1975.  That act of Congress, mandating (in an unspecified way and without a clear timetable) the “increasing” use of the metric system in the United States, created a U.S. Metric Board in charge of public education towards that end. More than one Jeremiad about the loss of our cultural identity was heard in the land; there was also ridicule (comedians joked about pushy people: “Give them 2.54 cm and they’ll take 1.6 km”).  The USMB was disbanded by 1982, and a quarter-century later, use of the metric system in the U.S. is incomplete and irregular at best.

So the ñ survives, and in the process has become much more than a mere letter. In both the Spanish-speaking world and in the U.S. (which, in truth, is part of that world, having some 40 million inhabitants for whom Spanish is either the sole, dominant, or maternal language), this letter symbolizes a language, a culture, a population. Thus, the weekly cultural supplement of Buenos Aires’s Clarín, one of Latin America’s largest-circulation daily newspapers, called Ñ, is now in its tenth year.  On its logo, cable network CNN en Español uses a large tilde (the ‘squiggle’) over both N’s. In 1999, Newsweek touted ‘Generation Ñ’, a phrase coined by Cuban-American publisher Bill Teck to name the magazine he founded, aimed at young North Americans of Latin American descent.

A series of little accidents, circumstances, and oddities of language and history led here: the double ‘N’ consonant in certain Latin words inherited by Spanish, palatalization leading to the ‘ny’ sound, the placing of one of the N’s atop the other… let bake for several centuries, turn up the heat of globalization and the imposition of standards, leading to the assertion of the rising cultural, demographic, and economic power of Spain, Latin America, and U.S. Hispanics/Latinos—and a once quaint and humble letter stands tall and looms large now, a sort of ambassador for an entire language and culture.

Pablo J. Davis, Ph.D., C.T. is Principal and Owner of Interfluency Translation+Culture (TM), which delivers Spanish and English translation solutions as well as interactive, inspiring cultural training.

Filed Under: Interflows Language+Culture Blog Tagged With: "Pablo J. Davis", alphabet, cultura, culture, Davis, English, español, globalization, Hispanic, hispanos, immigration, inglés, Interfluency, Latino, latinos, letters, ñ, Pablo, paleography, phonetics, Spanish, translation

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