Mind Your Language: Verbs and Verbosity

You loved his previous guest post, and you will love this one!

Jags Arthurson is the pen name of a Brighton, UK writer. Jags has been a research chemist and company director. He has lived and worked in over 40 countries. His novel, the crime thriller Pagan Justice, is available on Amazon with all proceeds going to charity.

 

They—the ubiquitous “they,” who always know better than the rest of us—claim that, despite English being the most widely spoken language in the world ever, it is hard to learn.  I was recently assailed on the subject by a Thai friend who complained that we had a fruit we called “pineapple” that was neither an apple nor came from a pine tree. This from a speaker of a language which is “tonal,” so the meaning of a word can pretty much change  depending on the direction of the wind.  I wonder which Thai genius first picked up a prawn and thought, “I’ll use the same word for this strange creature that I use for you but, if I say it slightly differently, then every time an unsuspecting foreigner tries to order prawns he’ll actually be saying “you,” and every time he addresses his companions he will be calling them ‘”prawn.”

These clever people, who condemn our language as difficult always roll out the old shibboleth surrounding the pronunciation of the syllable ough—pontificating on how hard it is for foreigners to remember the differences.  “Although I have a cough, I’m tough so I ought to plough through.”  But years ago I knew a Swiss woman who pronounced every occurrence of ough as “ow,” as in “out.”

“Althow I have a cow, I’m tou so I out to plow throu.”  She would also say things like, “I vish ve could go to the willage in the wan.”  But, after one “got one’s ear in,” she was perfectly comprehensible.

And that’s the thing about English—it’s ultimately flexible.  Take a simple sentence such as, “Tomorrow I will go to the cinema.”  There isn’t a standard way of saying this, so “I will go to the cinema tomorrow,” is equally valid.  But actually, providing one keeps the article with its noun, almost any combination of the words works.  “I, tomorrow, to the cinema will go”, “The cinema will I, tomorrow, go.”  Sometimes even the wrong verb works: “I was to the cinema yesterday,” is quite clear.  Contrast that with German where a verb, slipping forward of its assigned location dangling somewhere off the back bumper of a sentence, will attract rolled eyes, a sigh, and an uncomprehending shrug that would earn the envy of the most Gallic Frenchman.

And while we’re on that subject …

Verbs!  The engines of language. Without control of verbs, the tyro linguist is reduced to the position of a two year old, meandering through the world, pointing at random objects exclaiming, “gate,” “bird,” “red,” and so on.  But it is the verb that differentiates English from the other European languages.

First, the student of English has to learn the seven personal pronouns: I, you, he, she, it, we and they … or eight if you want to speak “American” and need you-all.  Now, say, you want to learn Spanish—the language claimed to be the easiest for English speakers—and you find almost twice as many: yo, tu, el, ella, usted, nosotros, nosotras, vosotros, vosotras, ellos, ellas and ustedes (South American Spanish even adds vos.)  Why do they need so many?  I, you (singular, informal), he, she, you (singular, formal), we (all male or mixed gender), we (all female), you (plural, all male or mixed gender, informal), you (all female, informal), they (all male or mixed gender), they (all female), you (plural, formal).  Note there is no it form because, like most European languages, every item has a gender that has to be learned by rote because each is assigned without any logic … breast (seno) is male, prostate (próstata) is female.  And if you think you can fudge the gender, forget it because all possessives, articles, and adjectives are dependent on it, so whereas students of English have just the definite and indefinite articles to learn, in Spanish there are four of each article: un, una, unos, unas, el, la, los and las!  Adjectives, immutable, concrete blocks in the flow of an English sentence, morph and change to fit the Spanish noun.  Many hours are wasted in every class learning, “nuestro sombrero rojo” but “nuestros sombreros rojos,” “nuestra manzana roja,” and “nuestras manzanas rojas.”  And there are even words that take the male articles but feminine adjectives, or that are masculine in the singular but feminine when plural! It all makes learning the difference between though and through feel like a walk in the park.

And the relative effort between learning English and learning Spanish diverges even more.  Apart from the occasional irregular verb, conjugation in English is ridiculously easy.  To conjugate, say, to eat one needs just two words: eat and eats.  I, you, we ,and they all eat.  He, she, and it eats.  That’s it.  Returning to Spanish we find that the same verb, comer, generates como, comes, come, comemos, coméis and comen.  In fact, because each form is different, it is conventional in Spanish not to use the pronoun at all.  This means the beginner can frequently be confused by whom is actually eating—especially when the third person forms also serve for the second person formal.

Then we move to the simple past tense, and again English wins because we need just one more word—ate.  That’s it.  Not so in Spanish where there is another complete conjugation: comí, comiste, comió, comimos, comisteis and comieron.  And as one progresses, the complications increase because in English we build our verbs.  To create the future tense we need will.  Everybody will eat, end of.  Spanish?  You’ve guessed it, another conjugation. Imperfect, (I was eating) another.  Conditional, (I would eat) …  In fact most European languages have, including the imperative form, fifteen separate tenses and moods, although maybe that should be sixteen because many of the imperatives have different negative forms.  And every single one has to be learned.

But you’ve finally cracked it, haven’t you?  Haven’t you?  Well, no, because we now come across the reflexive verbs. In most sentences, a subject does the transitive verb to the object, (I eat the food).  But in reflexive sentences the subject does the verb to itself (I wash myself).  And in English that’s how we do it … by making the object myself, yourself and so on.  In Spanish … you knew this was coming, didn’t you? … another verb form.  And there are lots and lots of reflexive verbs in Spanish.  In English we are called, but in Spanish even inanimate objects call themselves (llamarse).  And whereas we leave, they themselves leave.  We stand, they raise themselves.  On and on and on.  Nearly every intransitive verb has a reflexive form which is denoted by having the suffix se added to the infinitive.  But … did you see this coming? … this se is, itself (see what I did there?) conjugated (me, te, se, nos, os, se) thus doubling the number of verb forms to thirty—for EVERY VERB!

Surely that must be it, right?  Well, er, no because there’s one more class of verbs … the “gustar” verbs.  Gustar is generally translated as “to like” and is an example of a special construct that turns the normal subject-verb-object structure on its head to object-verb-subject.  In English “I like the food,” but in Spanish it is the food that is active and being likable, where I am passive to the process.  “Me gusta la comida” literally translates to “To myself is likable the food.”

But there is just a little relief because we can only talk about some thing or some things being likable to me so there are, instead of the full six-person conjugation, only two forms: gusta and gustan.

The gustar verb form is drilled in at every stage of the learning process.  Never, ever anything but the third person singular or the third person plural.  Me gusta el libro, me gustan los libros …  Great.

Or, at least, you would have thought so.

Because then I heard the song!

There I was, innocent as a baby, listening to Spanish radio and it leapt out at me like an angry tiger. It was by an Algerian-born Spaniard, Manu Chau.  I listened and could hardly believe my ears.  Did he really sing what I thought he did?

Me gustan los aviones, me gustas tú

Me gusta viajar, me gustas tú

Me gusta la mañana, me gustas tú

Me gusta el viento, me gustas tú

Me gusta soñar, me gustas tú

Me gusta la mar, me gustas tú

At the end, the presenter, just to rub salt into the wound, announced the title … Me Gustas Tú.  But how can that be?  Had I misunderstood all my lessons?  Had all my studies been in vain?  What to do?  I had no choice.  I sought the advice of María.

María Hernandez had taught (nurtured? nursed?) me thoughout my Spanish learning.  She responded to my email within an hour.  Spanish, she explained, is so structured that there are many things it is simply not possible to say, and one of them in particular revolves around gustar.  Young people, being naturally rebellious, do not like these constraints, so in recent years they have started to change the language of their forebears and begun to conjugate gustar as a normal, transitive verb.  She wrote all this in Spanish except, of course, the bit that it was not possible to say in Spanish—the phrase that had actually impelled the exchange.  Thus, the sentence my non-Spanish-speaking wife read, as she looked over my shoulder, was

Entonces, para los jovenes, me gustas tú significa en inglés: “I fancy you.”  Un abrazo, María.

For all my linguistic skills, it took a lot of fast talking to get me out of that one.