A very interesting NY Times piece by Elda Cantú (archived):
I have been speaking Spanish for over 40 years, and practically every day I learn a new word, an unfamiliar meaning or a new slang term.
I grew up on the border between Mexico and Texas, where a gallon container is called a yoga — after the English jug, the name given to milk containers on the U.S. side of the Rio Grande.
As a graduate student, I spent a few months among Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in New York, perreando at sweaty parties and soaking up the lyrics of what we’d now call classic reggaeton.
For nearly a decade, I worked as a journalist in South America. I married a Peruvian colleague, and even though we have lived in Mexico City for many years, the Spanish spoken in our home mixes vocabulary from our backgrounds: cuddling is apapacharse, a very Mexican word with Nahuatl roots, but scolding is the Peruvian resondrar. Chiles are called ajíes, as they are in Peru, but if we find them too spicy, we say nos enchilamos, the expression in Mexico.
On our team, which translates dozens of New York Times articles into Spanish each day, there’s an editor from Mexico City with roots in the north, an Ecuadorean journalist who has lived in Managua and Brasília, a Peruvian writer who studied in Barcelona and a couple of uprooted Venezuelans. Plus another handful of colleagues with personal and professional vocabularies that shape and enrich the work we do. Last week we added one more word to our shared vocabulary, courtesy of José María León Cabrera, a contributor based in Ecuador: changarse, which means something like a hug of the legs or lying down with your legs intertwined.
Almost nine years ago, José María, who is from Guayaquil, on Ecuador’s coast, moved to Quito, in the Andean region of his country. In the highlands, he began to hear the Spanish he’d known all his life mixed with Kichwa, the Indigenous language spoken by the Incas who inhabited the slopes of the Pichincha volcano — and roughly half a million Ecuadoreans today. The hybrid way of speaking strikes newcomers who think they know Spanish perfectly as peculiar. But it feels natural to its native speakers. José María explored this blend in an article that was published (in English and Spanish) last week. […]
He said he didn’t think the language he heard could be a story until 2024, while on a reporting trip with Julie Turkewitz and Federico Ríos, New York Times journalists based in Colombia. The group spent some time together riding in a van around Quito, and his colleagues remarked on some of the Kichwa-inflected words José María used. […]
“I had to approach it with curiosity and the joy of ignorance, like a kid would,” he said. He relied on experts, he added, to explain “a thing that we have taken for granted. And it’s actually filled with meaning, historical context. It’s filled with linguistic value.”
He also started paying more attention to the way people around him spoke, from the mayor of Quito to banking executives to workers on the street: They all used fusion words. The terms were also in the music of the singer Ñusta Picuasi and on menus all over town.
José María shared a sample of his notes and some of his favorite words: “I love wawa (baby), and I love shunsho (silly),” a word not included in the article because there were already so many examples. “They say, ‘Don’t be a shunsho — come on!’” he wrote on WhatsApp. “And everyone’s favorite: chuchaqui, which means hungover,” he added. Through his reporting, José María said, he learned that “experts believe it comes from chuchake, which in Kichwa was a disease of shame. That’s exactly how a hangover makes you feel.”
Thanks, Bathrobe!
Fun stuff!
Is “shunsho (silly)” not related to standard Spanish zonzo ‘stupid’?
“I had to approach it with curiosity and the joy of ignorance, like a kid would”—words to live by
Is “shunsho (silly)” not related to standard Spanish zonzo ‘stupid’?
A very good question!
This video (also on FB) emphasizes that the form is originally shushu, not shusho. Of course it could be a round-trip borrowing from Spanish to Kichwa and back.
I meant shunshu / shunsho of course.
I was struck by the spelling of wawa. In Chile, and I think in Peru and Ecuador, this is a very common word (derived from Quechua, I think), but spelt as guagua. The same word exists in Cuba and the Canaries, where it means bus, not baby, and it is understood but not used in that sense in the rest of Spain. Once my wife was in El Corte Inglés in Madrid, wanting to buy a gift for a newborn baby, and caused great puzzlement when she asked to be directed to la sección de guaguas (they don’t sell buses in El Corte Inglés).
Drifting a bit, many years ago I was driving around Lake Superior on the newly opened Trans-Canada Highway. Coming out of Sault-Ste.-Marie there was a sign saying Wawa 100 (in those days Canada measured distances in miles). Ten miles further along there was one that said Wawa 90, and so on to Wawa 10. Then nothing. After about 20 miles we wondered what had become of Wawa: apparently we had driven past it without noticing it.
How difficult it is to speak Spanish
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyGFz-zIjHE
The toponym Wawa, Ontario is supposedly clipped from ‘Wawungonk, meaning “place of clear water” or “hills covered in clear snow,”‘ in some unspecified Anishinaabe language. By contrast Wawa, Pennsylvania, which I recently mentioned in another thread, is supposedly named from the Ojibwe word for “snow goose.” Not that Ojibwe (which is either a synonym for Anishinaabe or a more specific part of the Anishinaabe group, depending on who you ask) had ever been spoken in that part of North America. But by the time a 19th-century gentleman wished to rename the former Pennellton (alias Grubb’s Bridge), the local Lenape-speakers were long gone and he had a copy of Longfellow’s _Song of Hiawatha_ at hand. (I don’t know whether Longfellow’s account of the Ojibwe lexicon was accurate.)
Aargh! The audio on the video at the youtube link I posted has been destroyed by AI. There is an unadulterated copy at
https://nicolasospina.com/video
if you scroll down to INTENTALO CARITO and click on the first option.
Out of perhaps idiosyncratic curiosity I have satisfied myself that the aforementioned Grubb’s Bridge must have been the predecessor of the current bridge that carries Baltimore Pike (alias U.S. 1) over Chester Creek. I don’t know which specific Grubb would have lent his or her name to the bridge, but presumably one of the many local descendants of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Grubb, who first arrived in the Delaware Valley in 1677, and subsequently lived in all three of what are now New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania.
Guagua at LH.
The audio on the video at the youtube link I posted has been destroyed by AI
I just had to check that out. OK. “Destroyed by AI” makes good sense as a description for what i hear at the first link.
Although human beans can still fuck up to that extent, AI seems to be catching up ! That’s the part they don’t tell you when enthusing about how AI is getting better and better at imitating … well, what people do. This throws a harsh light on human intelligence.
Oh dear. I don’t always remember what I posted in 2019. However, at least what I said then is consistent with what I said in this thread. The fact that threads at LanguageHat are immortal is in most respects a Good Thing, but it has its down side.
Good lord, if we worried about repeating ourselves there would be nothing but dead air here! You think repeating the substance of a comment is bad? I’ve repeated entire posts too many times to count. Just be glad you can stand by what you said the first time!
Guagua is sometimes used for a wah-wah pedal/effect, though the English spelling is more common.
I guess I’m not hearing whatever others are at the first link, since it’s the same video that is embedded at the second link. I’m curious what AI would be doing. Maybe my ad blocker is protecting me from the evil.
My vague memories tell me that “Wawa” or “Wa” is also a Chinese word for “child” or “baby”, either dialect or colloquial.
@Bathrobe
Yes, though I hear it in Taiwan more frequently for “doll”: 娃娃, 洋娃娃 (foreign doll). There’s also 娃娃菜, wawa vegetable, for “baby Chinese cabbage.” And a singer formerly known by the stage name Wawa. I guess she grew up (now age 61).
I recall that in Lebanese colloquial Arabic, wawa means “sick, ill”; it is regarded as a bit childish and in my experience is mostly used for the kind of transitory illness that keeps you from going to school or work like a flu, not for serious / life-threatening illness.