This entry marks my continued translation from
Spanish to English of the online article, "Sobre 'pilota', 'portavoza',
'miembra' y otros femeninos." by Salvador Gutiérrez, published in El
Mundo February 10, 2018. I began the translation some months back and started
to share it with you, then came a hiatus from blogging. I disappeared!
Actually, my medical writing and editing have been keeping me very busy, and busy
is good! But I want to be more diligent about making time for these entries,
which for me, keep the Spanish-English linguistic muscle alive and flexing!
Before continuing with the article, I'm going to side-step for a moment and mention something which initially here will seem out of place. A while back I had seen a movie called Sideways. If you've never seen it, please do! It's a wonderful film about wine, life, struggle, friendship, love, truth, deception, and self-discovery. If you have seen it, then you know what a great movie it is without further explanation. Well, at one point, one of the characters in the film refers to a
bottle of wine as being alive. That if it was opened on one day, it would taste
different than if it was opened on any other day. I mention this here because,
in many ways, I'm finding the process of translation to be very much the same.
Translation is a living process. How I express what is written on the page in
Spanish one day changes if I put the writing down and return to it at
another time. How does it change? Well, I can't alter the meaning the original author intended, but the
way I express that meaning varies as I vary. It's fluid, as I'm fluid. It
changes with me. I prepared the following paragraphs 3 months ago, but I read
them again today and made changes, because I'm not looking at it through the
same eyes--from even as little a time as 3 months back. I leave you with this
quote from Heraclitus, which best sums up this experience better than I can express it:
"No man ever steps in the same river twice,
for it's not the same river and he's not the same man."
*
Con la norma hemos
dado, amigo Sancho. En estas
situaciones, recuerdo las palabras de Emilio Alarcos en el "Prólogo" a su Gramática de la lengua
española: "Conviene así
que el normativismo se forre de escéptica cautela". Incluía esta
afirmación después de hacer referencia al Appendix Probi, un texto normativo del siglo IV en el que se
condenaban la forma de pronunciar y de escribir más de 250 palabras en el latín
hablado porque se apartaban de la norma del latín clásico: "mensa non mesa", "tabula non tabla", corregía. El éxito de tales anatemas
fue nulo: casi la totalidad de las formas repudiadas triunfaron en las lenguas
romances. El resultado del análisis coincide siempre con la tesis de Horacio en el Arte poética: la palabras perecen o reviven "si el
uso lo quiere" ("si uolet usus"). El pueblo es el dueño del idioma.
With the norm we have
given, friend Sancho. In these situations, I remember the words of Emilio
Alarcos in the “Prologue” to his Spanish Language
Grammar: “It helps that normativism is lined with skeptical caution.” It
included this affirmation after making reference to the Probi Appendix, a text
of rules from the 4th century in which condemned the manner of
pronouncing and writing more than 250 words in spoken Latin because they were
separated from the classical Latin rules: “mensa non mesa”, “tabula non tabla”,
they corrected. The success of such exclusions amounted to nothing: almost the
entire number of rejected words found their place in the romance
languages. The result of this analysis
always coincides with the thesis of Horacio in Poetic Art:the words appear or relive “if their use is warranted”
(“si uolet usus”). The people are the keepers of the language.
En las discusiones
sobre la corrección de una forma o de una expresión lingüística conviene
diferenciar dos conceptos: el sistema y la norma. El sistema es
el marco formal que establece las posibilidades de variación o de combinación
que permite la lengua. Muchas de esas posibilidades no están aplicadas o
explotadas por el uso, a causa de diferentes razones. La norma recoge lo que en un momento dado los
hablantes consideran correcto. El sistema es estable, cambia con extrema
dificultad. Sin embargo, la norma es variable, tornadiza. Depende de la
valoración del pueblo.
In discussions
regarding the correction of a word form or a linguistic expression, it helps to
differentiate between two concepts: the system and the rule. The system is the
formal mark that establishes the possibilities of variation or combination that
the language permits. Many of those possibilities are not applied or fully
explored in through regular use, due to various reasons. What is considered
“the rules” at the moment is what speakers consider correct. The system is
stable, and changes only with extreme difficulty. However, the rules are
variable, like a tornado’s path. They depend on the acceptance of the people.
Pongamos algunos
ejemplos. El sistema de la lengua nos dice que el femenino de sustantivos de
profesiones se forma morfológicamente añadiendo la desinencia -a al masculino.
Sin embargo, por diversas razones (muchas veces relacionadas con la realidad
social), esa posibilidad del sistema no siempre se realiza. En las Cortes de
Cádiz el término diputado era
masculino y solo designaba a varones, pues la mujer no podía ser elegida
parlamentaria. Cuando alcanza este derecho, el término diputada, perfecta según el sistema de la lengua,
chocaba con la costumbre, con la norma, por lo que se prefirió durante algún
tiempo diferenciar el sexo solo a través del artículo (el diputado/la diputado). Más tarde, el uso generalizará la forma femenina y hoy
decimos con toda naturalidad diputada.
We’ll give a few
examples. The language system tells us that the feminine of professional nouns
is formed morphologically by adding the ending “-a” to the masculine. However,
for various reasons (many times related to the social climate), that suggestion
of the language system is not always accomplished. In “Las Cortes de Cádiz”, the term “diputado”
was masculine and only meant for men, because a woman couldn’t be elected to
parliament. When this right was achieved, the term “diputada”, perfect according
to the language system, clashed with custom,
with the accepted norm, which preferred during that time to
differentiate between the sexes through a change in the article (el diputado/
la diputado). Later, with use, the feminine form would become more common and
today we say completely naturally “diputada”.
Reference
Gutiérrez, Salvador Ó. (2018 February 10). Sobre
'pilota', 'portavoza', 'miembra' y otros femeninos. El Mundo. Retrieved from:
www.elmundo.es/espana/2018/02/10/5a7df963ca474179478b4698.html
