The Danger of False Cognates

You probably have heard that the Spanish word "embarazada" does not mean "embarrassed," but "pregnant." This is an example of what is known as a false cognate. A true cognate would be, for example, "el grupo" which means "group." While we're in the process of learning to speak or write another language, cognates are helpful for us when we get stuck and have to guess a word. We should still make those sorts of educated guesses, but be aware that there are a few words that sound like one thing in English and mean another.

We're not the only ones with that dilemma. Spanish speakers have the same difficulty when they try to use English. The hand soap in the picture is a perfect example. The Spanish word "sanidad" does not mean "sanity" but "health," but the company in question must have been confused, or assumed that the consumer wouldn't care, when they named this hand soap "Sanity Plus." I milked this for all it was worth and would ask if using this soap would help me keep my sanity. For the record, "sanity" would be loosely translated into Spanish as "salud mental," or mental health.

The View from the "Piedra Capira" in Colombia (2009)

Two weeks ago I took a trip to the town of Guaduas, about a 3-hour drive from Bogotá (4 hours on the slow-moving buses). One of the highlights of the region is the point called the Piedra Capira, which is a rock with a cross perched on it, that hangs over the edge of the hill, showing the full view of the Magdalena River. (The Magdalena is the Colombian equivalent of the Mississippi and runs nearly the full length of the country, flowing northward before it empties out into the Caribbean Sea.) To get to the Piedra Capira, one leaves Guaduas on the route toward the town of Honda, drives for about 15 minutes, and makes a left at the sign. The rest of the way is through a narrow gravel and dirt road, and at some point the car has to be parked and one has to go on foot until reaching the rock. I was especially surprised that this attraction did not appear in any guidebook, just in a pamphlet issued in the town of Guaduas.

On a clear morning the volcanoes Nevado del Tolima (left) and the Nevado del Ruiz (far right) are visible. There are two smaller peaks, barely visible in between these, called the Nevado del Quindío and the Nevado de Santa Isabel. I added new photos from this last trip to Colombia at the webpage for Cundinamarca, the name of the province that surrounds Bogotá.

Providenciales, Turks and Caicos Islands (2009)

I've just returned from a short travel agent familiarization (FAM) trip to Beaches Turks and Caicos, which is located on the island of Providenciales, also known as Provo, the most developed of the Turks and Caicos Islands. The slogan "Where on earth are the Turks and Caicos Islands?" is well-chosen, because invariably someone who hears of those islands will ask that same question. They are part of the same chain of limestone and coral islands as the Bahamas, but are south and east of Nassau and slightly north of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Technically they aren't Caribbean islands because they face the Atlantic Ocean, not the Caribbean Sea, but culturally they do have a lot in common with the islands that face the Caribbean.

The major attraction of Provo is its beautiful 12-mile Grace Bay Beach, which runs across the entire northern part of the island. The offshore coral reef makes for gentle waves, ideal for floating in the water, and the sand is powdery soft. Because the surrounding waters are protected by law from fishing, there are a surprising number of fish swimming in the water very close to shore, something I also saw in the Bahamas. The water is so clear that you can see the bottom as if you were in a swimming pool.

See more pictures from Provo on my travel website.

New feature on my website with Google Maps

On my Latin and Caribbean travel site I added a map using Google Maps to show the places I've visited. The map can be zoomed in and out to get more or less detail. When you get to the site, you can click on the markers to see the place names and in some cases I've added some descriptions under the locations. Over time I'll add more specific information and link it to my blog entries.

The making of guava paste in Santander, Colombia (1980)

In Christmas 1980, I went with a group of friends to a farming area in the province of Santander in Colombia. The purpose was to spend time assisting a local priest (an American) in his mission work by visiting the campesinos in the countryside and celebrating Christmas in their parish church. The climate there was warm but not exceedingly hot: what is called "tierra templada" (temperate land). The other types of climates in the tropics, depending on the altitude, are "tierra caliente" (hot land), "tierra fría" (cold land), and "tierra helada" (frozen land).

Some of the campesinos made guava paste, which was formed into blocks, wrapped in banana or plantain leaves, and shipped to the rest of Colombia. This paste was what is known as the "bocadillo veleño." Bocadillo refers to the sugary guava paste and veleño means that it comes from the town of Vélez, which we could see from the top of the hill. One of our stops was one of these places where the guavas were crushed and mixed with sugar. I'm trying out the paste, which at that point was still hot and not yet formed. When I got back to Bogotá and told a friend there about my trip, he said that it was not a good idea to eat it hot because it caused diarrhea, but I don't remember suffering any ill effects from it.

Another highlight from the trip was tasting the foam that came out of the cow when the campesinos began the process of milking it. It was sweet, almost like a milk shake.

See my travel website for more information on Colombia.

More insights into Spanish words

Continuing with my theme of Spanish words, I have found the learning of the language a lifelong process. This is not to discourage anyone from learning, but rather to highlight the interesting things that come up as we're confronted with words that we don't recognize, or where our classroom or book learning can't prepare us for all real-life situations. I liken learning Spanish to what a friend told me about learning to play the guitar: "easy to learn badly but hard to learn well." Spanish throws a lot more at a person than the common misconception of Spanish being easy leads us English speakers to believe.

One example is illustrated on this sign that I photographed in Bogota two years ago. It is advertising a new apartment complex that will have two elevators, a garbage chute, and two social halls or community rooms that are also common in some apartment complexes here in the US. If I hadn't sounded out the word "shut" the way a Spanish-speaking person would, I never would have figured out that it meant "chute." "Shut" is the English word spelled phonetically in Spanish, though the "sh" sound does not exist in Spanish except in countries in southern South America such as Argentina, Uruguay and Chile, and where the sound does exist, it is never spelled "sh" except perhaps in a word borrowed from another language. 

Another even more important example is the word "muchacha," where not knowing how the word is used could create problems. If I had only paid attention to my high school Spanish textbook, I would have assumed that the word always meant girl or young woman. However, "muchacha" could also mean maid or servant girl, and maids sometimes dislike the use of the word when referring to them, preferring the terms "empleada doméstica" or "empleada de servicio" (female domestic or service employee).

See my language learning webpage for more tips.

Learning and re-learning Spanish

It's no secret that, with 21 countries that count Spanish as their official language, there would be differences between these countries regarding which words mean what. Take the Ferris wheel, for example. In Spain the word is "noria," but in Colombia it's called the "rueda de Chicago" (literally, "Chicago wheel") probably because the first Ferris wheel was exhibited in Chicago in 1893 (see  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferris_wheel). By the way, the "noria" in the picture was taken at the April Fair (Feria de Abril) in Seville.

When I first studied Spanish in high school I learned that the word for socks was "calcetines" and the word for women's stockings was "medias," but when I got to Mexico the word "medias" was used for both, as it was in Colombia. I didn't get to Spain until 2006, and while conversing with a Spaniard on the return flight to Philadelphia, I used the word "medias" to mean socks, and he corrected me, bringing back that word "calcetines" that I hadn't heard since high school.

I found that people in Spain were not fond of Anglicized Spanish words or English words mixed in with Spanish. Another Spaniard I met corrected my use of "ok" in a sentence, something that I found common in other places I visited. They would probably cringe if I used the word "lonchar" for "eat lunch" instead of "almorzar", or "checar" or "chequear" to mean to check or review instead of "revisar." However, the Spaniards are not free of English or Anglicized words in their Spanish either. The word for "ticket" can be "boleto" or "tiquete," but in Spain you hear it called "el ticket." While in a restaurant in Seville I found that the waitresses were confused when I asked for "salsa de tomate," which is used in Colombia to mean ketchup, but they understood perfectly when I used the word "ketchup." I thought it was funny because not too long before that, there was a popular song called "Aserejé" sung by a Spanish female singing group called "Las Ketchup"! For more information on "Aserejé" or "The Ketchup Song, " see the article in Wikipedia. 

For tips on languages, see my webpage on language learning.