Porous Frontiers
You do not really need to know another language to know that linguistic frontiers are very porous, resulting in words from one language being incorporated into another.
English is a wonderful example of this, beginning life as a Germanic language that imposed itself on the native tongues of what was to become Scotland, England and some extent, Ireland. That mash-up, in its turn, having Nordic languages stamped on top of it. The Normans were so kind as to invade, conquer and rule large parts of the island for several hundred years, resulting in the wholesale importation of French words into the island’s language. For centuries the mark of an educated Western man – and yes it was men mainly being educated at that period of time – was his knowledge of Latin and to a lesser degree Greek. For that reason and with the scientific revolution, large numbers of Latin and Greek words have found their way into English. Let us not forget the madness that was English colonization and empire building, dragging words from the four corners of the globe into the Queen’s English. Whew… that was a mouthful.
Languages tend to group into families, and thus share words or have very similar words. Think of the family of romantic languages such as Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, etc.
Cognates
One reason Spanish is cited as the language easiest to learn for English speakers is the large number of cognates shared by the languages, cognates being words that are the same or very similar between two languages. Common examples are: metro, hospital, idea, escape, lava, visa, sociable, inevitable, funeral, original, cereal, horrible, and motor. Of course, the pronunciation is different between Spanish and English.
Then there are amigos falsos, or to put it another way false cognates. One that tripped me up early in my language learning journey was actual. In English is means real, but in Spanish it means current as in mi esposa actual – my current wife, a phrase that could easy lead to a divorce.
One Language, Many Countries
Spanish is the official language in 21 countries, mostly in Latin America, but it is also spoken in other countries to some extent like Belize, The Philippines, Gibraltar and Andorra. Mexico is the country with the most Spanish speakers at around 125 million. The United States comes in 5th, just behind Spain, with 41 million native Spanish speakers, and will probably surpass Spain shortly.
One of the difficulties of learning Spanish is that frequently different countries or even areas within a country have different words for the same concept. I once saw an article that listed the 11 Spanish words used for the English concept of a drinking straw, just depends where you are at.
Gave a Spanish Lesson to My Spanish Teachers
I had a class with my Mexican Spanish tutor who lives in Honduras. We were talking about New Year’s Resolutions and he used the word reset like someone would use reboot. He had decided that his 2024 needed a reset. You know that is an English word, I said to him. Oh no, it is Spanish, and he was trying to put a verb, resetear, with the noun, reset. After a bit he was off to the site of the Real Academia Española, more or less the cop for what is and isn’t part of the Spanish language, very similar to the Académie Française. Turns out it is not Spanish. A few days later I asked a Venezuelan lady about reset and we went down the same rabbit hole. Languages are porous.
Un Chicago or Una Chicago
Which brings me to Ferris wheels. I had shared with a few of my tutors this video about St. Louis: The Most Accurate STL Anthem Ever? One of the things featured in the video is the giant Ferris wheel at Union Station. As we were talking about it I asked what the Spanish was for Ferris wheel. Interesting that you should inquire about that, throughout most of Latin America they are called rueda de la fortuna –wheel of fortune. Here in El Salvador we call them Chicagos. Then he went on to explain that they had started out as rueda de Chicago – wheel of Chicago, but that had been shorten to simply Chicago. Apparently enough El Salvadorians had been to Chicago, at one time or another, that they had memories of the Ferris wheel on Navy Pier on Lake Michigan in Chicago.
The question I forgot to ask, with Spanish being a gendered language, was Chicago feminine or masculine. For the most part, words ending in –o are masculine and in –a feminine, but it is a rule with many exceptions. For our purposes what comes to mind is la foto – the photograph. It is feminine because it is the shorten version of fotografía, a feminine word. Since rueda is feminine should it be una Chicago or because of the –o ending un Chicago?
Way, way more than you ever wanted to know.