Castilian vs. Catalan, round 2

[muckefuck]

A friend asked me some time ago how different Catalan and Castilian really are. I should have a pat answer to this question, but I don't. (When I'm feeling glib, I quote the Spanish saying "To make a Spanish word Catalan, cut it in half".) It's hard to sum up differences between related speech varieties in a concise manner and labels like "separate language" or "dialect" are crude and misleading.

The best I can really do, then, is to toss out examples and let people draw their own conclusions. I can't remember what example sentence I tossed out for my friend (who speaks some Spanish and, therefore, has a basis for comparison), but I think it had vaig veure ("I saw") in it, since I like the sound of it so much. The tricky thing is, of course, that it's almost as easy to come up with a Catalan sentence that's hardly different from its Castilian equivalent as it is to find one that's completely unintelligible.

I recently finished reading El capitán Alatriste (soon to be a major motion picture starring Viggo Mortensen!), which is an enjoyable little homage to the Golden Age of Spain and the picaresque literature it produced. The lead character is a strong silent type, which leads to enough shrugging of shoulders to bring to mind a recent Onion article.

The Castilian phrase is (se) encogió los hombros. Hombro is a regular development from Classical Latin humerus, a word which doesn't survive in more lexically "progressive" Romance varieties. The verb is a derivative of Latin colligere "collect" and means "shrink, contract" (literally, to "pull in").

One of the many times I came across the phrase, it occurred to me that I had no idea what the Catalan equivalent was. The cognate development of colligere is collir, which is narrower in meaning than Spanish coger; it mainly refers to the act of harvesting. Encollir, the form answering to encoger, is even rarer and isn't found in the modern standard language.

What would the Catalans say for "He shrugged his shoulders"? Va arronsar les espatlles. Arronsar also means "contract", but it comes from an Arabic rather than Latin root. (Romz "wink, tic".) AFAICT, there's no Castilian cognate. (Ronzar is onomatopoetic in origin and refers to a very different action.) Catalan also goes with French (épaule) and Italian (spalla) in its choice of term for the body part, but speakers of those languages "raise" (hausser bzw. alzare) their shoulders, they don't "contract" them.

In terms of syntax, the chief contrast is between the Castilian synthetic preterite and the Catalan periphrastic past, idiosyncratically formed with the present tense of "go" plus the infinitive. (A synthetic form, arronsà does exist, but you'd be unlikely to hear it in speech.)

Now a pronunciation comparison, in broad IPA:
Encogió los hombros. [eŋko'xjolos'ombɾos]
Va arronsar les espatlles. ['varun'saləzəspaʎ:əs]

Comments

[aadroma.livejournal.com]

Indeed, I find it fascinating how regular Catalan sentences will go in and out of my ability to understand them as a Spanish speaker so quickly -- Eurovision entries demonstrate this well, with lyrics like, "És difícil saber que és molt dur el que m'espera sense tu al meu costat," and I start mentally PARSING it as Spanish (as it is pronounced identically to the Castillian counterpart to start off with) until I hit "molt", and then it quickly disintegrates. :: laugh ::

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Close, but not identically. Catalan has "dark l" like English, so it's [ði'fisiɫ], not [ði'fisil] (or--in my Castilian--[ði'fiθil]). Also, the final /r/ is dropped from saber--or was the singer using some kind of overpronounced stage diction?

[pne.livejournal.com]

the Catalan periphrastic past, idiosyncratically formed with the present tense of "go" plus the infinitive.

That always seemed quaint to me, since I'm used to having such constructions refer to the future, rather than the past -- as in I'm going to eat something and Je vais t'appeler. (I think Castilian does this, too, doesn't it? Voy a trabajar?)

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Confusingly enough, so does Catalan: Vaig a treballar "I will work." Leave out the prepostion, however, and you have a preterite.

[pne.livejournal.com]

How odd.

Why can't everyone just speak proper. You know, use an auxiliary meaning "do, make" to form questions or negatives, for example, the way nearly all languages do.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Why not an auxiliary for every statement as well, as in Basque?

[nashobabear.livejournal.com]

I'm only in Week 3 here, guy. And having weird interefrences fomr opther languages...French obviously seeps in. For example "Creo que no" arrived crystal clear, and suddenly up seeped "Je pense que non," a construct that I wrestled with for a long time, my brain resisting the que clause construction. We are learning to always use the peronsal pronoun (as training wheels), so every time we say "Yo" I write "You" and my brains says "я" and shortcircuits, switcing briefly to Russian, then disintegrating into a Babel of words. Same thing with numbers: tell me a year "1721," say, and m ybrain saysmountains of words suddenly releaed from syntax, defintion, or any osrt of rule ...ai, ai, ai

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Dates are the bane of my existence. I'll be showing off, fluidly reading a foreign text aloud, then I'll hit a large number and the flimsy charade is exposed for what it is as I stumble to find the correct reading.

[nashobabear.livejournal.com]

Along with .. el problema (Sp), la probl`eme (Fr), "das Problem" (Ger), [masc, fem, nueter] "Проблема," [fem], and Dutch ...het probleem (oddly enough, having the same gneder as its cognate in German...)

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Nothing odd about that: They both get it from the original Greek προβλήμα, which is neuter. Since Spanish and French don't have a neuter, they have to go with masculine or feminine. French speakers are apparently more influenced by form in this case whereas for the Spanish speakers it's the close historical connexions between masculine and neuter which are decisive.