Defensa apasionada del idioma español

Defensa apasionada del idioma español, by Álex Grijelmo. Punto de Lectura.

The book’s title translates to “[A] Passionate Defense of the Spanish Language”. It started on a high note. People write badly, use words unnecessarily borrowed from other languages, and generally disrespect their linguistic heritage. “Right on!”, I said, and kept on saying during a non-contiguous third of the book.

The rest was not so good.

Those non-contiguous two thirds of the book cover the many things Grijelmo knows little about: English (from which modern Spanish borrows many words), computers, international trade, history, and more and how they relate to modern Spanish usage.

Taking English, Grijelmo rails against Anglicisms in large part because he thinks that they fragment the language, with the ultimate effect of causing unintelligibility among speakers: a debatable conclusion.

It’s true that many Spanish speakers today use words borrowed from the English that are strictly unnecessary.

Some do it thinking it makes them sound sophisticated, which I find rather obnoxious, not least because those words are all too often misused (and mispronounced!). “Esto es para tax purposes” is as good bad an example as any.

It’s also true that a number of false cognates have been made true cognates through misuse. The word “evento”, for example, didn’t always mean something planned such as a show, but rather something unplanned. English retains this meaning: “in the event of an emergency…”

And then there are Latinos who live in the US and other English-speaking countries who have adapted English words into Spanish: “parquear el carro a la marqueta”, for example. Here, the unintelligibility argument holds no water, and in fact is rather insulting to Spanish speakers. Does he think that they’re all so stupid that after a short period of exposure they couldn’t understand a dialect where less than 1% (my estimate; I’d be interested in seeing real figures) of the words are different?

I happen to find the first two cases of Anglicisms unnecessary and, indeed, rather tasteless. I try to avoid them. Sometimes my incomplete vocabulary makes this difficult, although I do my best: “Vamos a un … ¿cómo se dice? En inglés la palabra es «show».” I don’t use the Anglicisms used by Latinos in English-speaking countries, but nor do I denigrate them — in fact, I think they enrich the language as a whole.

For the most part, I wrote off Grilejmo as a grumpy old fart. There’s nothing wrong with that, really. But his downright absurd statements about English (and other things, of course, but this book is really too insignificant for it to be worth it to criticize everything) are what really got to me. He calls it a frigid language, less expressive, blah blah.

It ends on a positive, and almost inspiring note. But by then it was too late, and the damage was done. A waste of time and paper. Too bad, considering its potential.

(Oh, occasionally he put in a little parting shot at the ends of chapters in an attempt to be funny, much like The Economist often does, except The Economist’s quips are generally humorous. Grijelmo’s are not.)