No cuela

[muckefuck]

One of the oddities of learning a language through formal instruction is that the most basic sentences can be the hardest to understand. For an English-speaker, this is nowhere more true than with the Romance languages, which share a lot of higher vocabulary. Even those of you who have never studied Spanish probably have little trouble making sense of a sentence like, "Su territorio está dividido en 23 provincias y una ciudad autónoma, Buenos Aires, capital de la nación y sede del gobierno federal." But you'd be at least as stumped as I was by this fragment from Marsé:

...tendiendo la colada con una tonadilla y dos pinzas entre los dientes.

Bolded are all the words I wasn't familiar with. So all I understood was that a woman was in the yard tending? the...something to do with "tail"? with a...I've got no idea. Pinzas might've been the key for me to unlock the entire meaning if only I'd remembered it could mean "clothespins" in addition to "pincers". The words I didn't know were "hanging up", "washing", and, well, tonadilla, a uniquely Spanish musical form that sounds like a cross between a ballad and a light opera air. (Now you see why I enjoy Marsé so much; "with a ballad and two pins between her teeth" is quite a nice turn of phrase.)

Comments

[tyrannio.livejournal.com]

I have a similar problem especially in Hebrew. If I need to thank someone for providing food for all beings or causing bread to grow from the earth, I'm fine: if I want to order a falafel sandwich with pickled turnips, I'm lost.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Hebrew is kind of a special case, though, right? monshu knows how to say, "Please pass the mustard" in Latin, but that's only because there were solemnities in the community where they were only allowed to speak Latin at table in order to cut down on chatter.

[tyrannio.livejournal.com]

Yeah, liturgical language instruction is different. (I remember how to say "Please pass the" from Camp Ramah, but I seem to have blocked out any particular foodstuffs: institutional fleishig Ashkenazi food of the early 1980s was ... mediocre.)