cuaresma
methinks hearing the word, "cuaresma" triggered another of the linguistic weirds i have been experiencing since? ? ? since i mastered my first human language through preadolescent speech? for sure since i attempted to master my second human language --german-- in the early to mid 70's. when our farm assistant used the word while asking me to explain "easter." i was well versed in this particular disparity from participating in "cuaresma" in ecuador. gringos aren't allowed to speak spanish in the u.s., so i had not used the word since i left ecuador in 2008. gringo catholics celebrate "lent" and are not welcome to speak of "cuaresma."
flashbacks to my political traumas in spanish speaking countries/immigrant camps are fissuring like a congressional debates in my head. even translating them is a challenge. here, attempts to translate are typically met with variants on the theme, "los gringos no se puedan hablar."
me duele la cabeza. . .
can i maintain my covidic isolation on all that ruckus? international labor day approaches. . . the repurcussions of the hispanic demonstration which rocked post katrina new orleans (2006) is especially noisy today. no tengo palabras. . .
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most of my flashback episodes are accompanied by a sound track. "el condor pasa" has emerged as the sound track for this morning's go-round, both with and without the lyrics paul simon added to Daniel Alomía Robles' magnificent orchestral original. this flashback series is mostly in spanish, so the soundtrack is mostly without paul simon's add-ons and into the uncountable versions circulating the spanish speaking americas. among the more humorous flashbacks in this series is to a witnessed discussion between a bolivian and a peruvian over which country had ownership of the song. Daniel Alomía Robles was peruvian, so the bolivian was having to fight peruvian oppression yet again. . . if i'm translating correctly. . . i bet not even a mexican would recognize all of THOSE words. cursing is a very dialectic practice.
a man gets tired up to the bone
he gives the world its saddest song
its saddest song
ooh-ooh-ooh. . .
yea, women get fed up, too, paulie pooh.
Gentle hug sweetie.... I don't know Spanish however I've heard enough singing in Spanish to recognize what a beautiful language it is..... I'm sorry that you've been hurt
I hope that today will bring you some peace
I am good at cursing though!!!.... xo
spanish, like all languages, both human and non-human, holds both beauty and horror. music shows both and all the shades between the extremes, but the horror songs seldom make the top 40 charts.
i sincerely believe that music is my first language. even my speech therapists agreed. to this day, i still stutter allot, but i can always sing, albeit frequently out of tune and out of time. perfect pitch/rhythm doesn't express the chaos very well.
Music is like magic! My aunt had a major stroke and she can’t speak anything more then 2 words. She CAN sing though- Wild! I had to look up cuaresma. Lent is something that we vaguely followed as youngsters but then departed from it.
I hope your day is getting better. I stutter at times too.
lent is a pretty big deal in the catholic church. technically, cuaresma is a direct translation, pero, pero, pero. . . explicame, por favor.
i slept well last night. no nightmares. methinks the flashbacks are settling into mere memories. processing. . .
in my english speaking circles, there has been talk and even some action on the need to provide emotional support for volunteers/mission workers for those of us who work at disaster scenes, immigrant camps, etc. it helps, but the dynamics are more often discussed in terms of beatification than pragmatic realities. still, it helps when the people we are serving remain cognizant that our work is not just a job for volunteers.
in spanish, the concept of volunteer service is a pretty foreign concept. the clients typically assume we are getting big bucks to be there and taking the abuse is just part of the gig. ! ! ! viva la revolucion! ! !. authority must be defied. finding empathy, much less support, is difficult in spanish. in order to find support in english, i must first translate the problems to english. the recollections tangle mightily in the attempt. UN translator, i ain't. i can't even keep my english proper, much less spanish and even less so for the translations.
sorting. . . processing. . .
Lent
Lent [Old Eng. lencten,=spring], Latin Quadragesima (meaning 40; thus the 40 days of Lent). In Christianity, Lent is a time of penance, prayer, preparation for or recollection of baptism, and preparation for the celebration of Easter. Observance of Lent is as old as the 4th cent. In Eastern churches it is reckoned as the six weeks before Palm Sunday. In the West the penitential season begins liturgically with Septuagesima, the ninth Sunday before Easter; the next Sundays are Sexagesima and Quinquagesima. Lent begins on Ash Wednesday, the 40th weekday before Easter. Of the Sundays in Lent the fifth is Passion Sunday and the last is Palm Sunday. The week preceding Easter is Holy Week. Lent ends at midnight Holy Saturday. See Shrove Tuesday. From the 5th to 9th cent. strict fasting was required; only one meal was allowed per day, and meat and fish (and sometimes eggs and dairy) were forbidden. During and since the 9th cent. fasting restrictions were gradually loosened. By the 20th cent. meat was allowed, except on Fridays. Pope Paul VI began (1966) a trend toward penitential works (such as acts of charity) in conjunction with Lent. The Christian observance of Lent may have a parallel in the fasting practiced in Greco-Roman mystery religions, in which it was considered an aid to enlightenment and often preceeded prophecy. Lent may also have a parallel in the Jewish Omer, the interval between Passover and Shavuot that has become a time of semimourning and sadness. During the weeks of the Omer period, Jews in some communities refrain from wearing new clothes and there are no marriages or other public festivities.
I tried to copy the derivation of the word but couldn’t. You can see the root word above. The word Lent came from a different root word than cuaresma.
etymology is one of my more passionate hobbies, in all of my languages. it is more accurate to say i study linguistics more than language.
Lent (n.)
"period between Ash Wednesday and Easter," late 14c., short for Lenten (n.) "the forty days of fasting before Easter" in the Christian calendar (early 12c.), from Old English lencten "springtime, spring," the season, also "the fast of Lent," from West Germanic *langitinaz "long-days," or "lengthening of the day" (source also of Old Saxon lentin, Middle Dutch lenten, Old High German lengizin manoth). This prehistoric compound probably refers to increasing daylight in spring and is reconstructed to be from *langaz "long" (source of long (adj.)) + *tina- "day" (compare Gothic sin-teins "daily"), which is cognate with Old Church Slavonic dini, Lithuanian diena, Latin dies "day" (from PIE root *dyeu- "to shine").
Compare similar form evolution in Dutch lente (Middle Dutch lentin), German Lenz (Old High German lengizin) "spring." But the Church sense is peculiar to English. The -en in Lenten (n.) was perhaps mistaken for an affix.
language is a magical thing! It's forever changing!
amen, i say on to thee, amen. awomen, too.
german is my second human language. i lived in west germany from 1974 to 1976 and studied the language before and during my time there. i left with a fear of speaking the language. the locals were scathingly critical of my language with harsh opinions on whether "yankees" were even capable of speaking any language to euro standards. my mother's family had immigrated from west germany, but they were quick to let me know i was not german. i was american. there was much animosity, in heavily accented english, toward "americans" who wanted to practice german on them while they demanded we let them practice english on us. keep practicing, my friend. you have a ways to go. i doesn't know, but i'll bet the folks from england will tell you so, as well. in that, you and i are equals, my linguistically superior ma'am/sir.
i s'pose the biggest diff between my second and third languages is exposure and the extent of mastery. it is rare to hear german in the americas. the german blood runs thick throughout all of the americas, but we are not germans. we are americans and? ? ? reference above paragraph. german is rarely heard here and the opportunities to practice are nearly non-existant.
spanish is no more native to the americas than english, but it was the first european language to dominate from the gulf coast of north america to argentina. the strength and ferocity of the spanish armada gave their language around 150 years to establish itself before any other european languages were permitted to cross the atlantic ocean. when the rest of europe began crossing the atlantic, their destinations were mostly to the north of the spanish colonies. georgia was a much smaller state in the original 13 colonies and u.s. foothold their remained tenuous until after the spanish american war of 1898. american spanish has a far more established history than american english. both languages are heavily browbeaten by their parent countries. colonials are such barbarians! ! ! methinks it fair to say the same phenom exists in all the languages of the american immigrant colonies, north, central, and south. i wonder now if south american koreans can speak easily with north american koreans. just wondering without sufficient curiosity to do the research. i'm willing to bet dollars to wishes that folks who never left korea disapprove of colonial korean.
a strictly personal fact that both hubby and fa have in common is that they are both city kids savoring their first tastes of farm life. both take great pride in their agricultural roots from the depths of urban environments. i amnae certain how well the understand one another when they collaborate, but they are on the same sheet of music far more often than i can harmonize with either one of them, in either language. both have better words than i for just about everything, in both languages. i mostly keep a safe social distance from all of their projects. i earnest prefer working my outdoor projects solo. no human words needed en cualquier idioma.
fa has expressed considerable interest in my chickens, in between reacting like a city girl to their unsanitary nature. brooding season is upon us and she is bringing up the subject often enough that i feel like i need to learn how to talk about chickens in spanish. i can't tell if her euphemisms are dominican or just citified, but the conversation about the brooding process is not going well. i've been taking it upon myself to attempt learning the poultry dialect in spanish. in english, talking chicken with city kids requires allot of new terms and the terms are not highly consistent among the folks. i haven't even had the opportunity to attempt jumping this gulf in spanish. my ecuadorian studies didn't touch that biological subset. the university was in a city, after all.
this morning fa arrived to find me surfing mexican and spanish (from spain) on "la gallina clueca." i was finding clear, sensible science, but she immediately shot it down as, "no en mi pais." the word is "culeca" in the dominican republic. "la gallina culeca " brought up children's cartoons.
me duele la cabeza. . . spanish speakers often tell me that spanish is a phonetically perfect language. how did this phonetically perfect language spawn thousands of dialects. my spanish professors and tutors didn't know, either, but they were quite certain that myth deserves credit for the lousy spelling one so often finds in spanish.
sleep is proving elusive tonight. i'm still spinning like a top over the discouragement of learning about "pollos." better to stick with chickens. the natural fact is that fa is the only spanish speaker in my life and she doesn't even like pollos. i haven't asked, but i bet she doesn't like chickens, either.
i did, however, do some surfing on "culeca" and ? ? ? it is mildly entertaining how many different meanings there are for the word. depende de su pais and there are 33 countries in latin america. still, like cholo and chico and quite a few other spanish words, think i find myself wanting to let it go at "los gringos no se pueden." as with english, "they can't" (no se puede) can speak of ability or prohibition. spanish is a european language, so i know fair-skinned people are capable. for sure, here in "gringolandia" the value of learning this insanely dialectic language is extremely limited, even for morenos who are raised and educated in english.