Sunday, 18 July 2004
11:59pm

S

o I've been kind of bored tonight, and I stumbled upon a celebrity tabloid type website from Spain, and as I was going through it, I was kind of impressed by the tenacity of european paparazzi or whatever... I mean they had stuff on a lot of American actors that I didn't even hear about here. I was also actually pretty impressed with myself and how well I was still able to understand Spanish. Back in high school, I was nearly fluent, but then when I went to college, I kind of didn't have anyone to speak Spanish to anymore, and I didn't really want to seek anyone out just for the purpose of speaking in Spanish to them, so my skills -- particularly in vocabulary -- diminished. I mean, I'm still pretty good with the grammar, but my vocabulary is probably 1/10th of what it was.
Still, I was inspired to look for some legitimate news sites from Spain (hey, I have kind of a soft spot for Spain since I did spend some time there). I was pretty sure that when it came to world news, a lot of the vocabulary would be way over my head -- and it was. But I did stumble upon an interesting word for which there is no direct American equivalent, in this article about an American air attack in Fallujah. And that word is estadounidense.
I guess it literally means "United States-ican"... and thinking about that, I realized that yeah, we really don't have a single-word equivalent for "of the United States". We just always use the word "American". And I guess that's kind of a reflection of our arrogance as a nation -- to take a word that really refers to the combination of two entire continents, and use it to refer to just our own country.
Then again, we aren't exactly the only culture to use the word "America" to specifically refer to the United States. For example, in the early and middle part of the 20th century, so many Italians were talking about L'america (short for "la america"), in reference to the United States, that a lot of Italians actually thought the name of this country was "Lamerica".
Heck, I don't even know how many other countries have words like estadounidense. Maybe everybody else in the world just calls us "America". Besides, those Spaniards are rather peculiar about their language and maintaining its purity -- while most of the rest of the Spanish-speaking world is content with bastardizing English words and adding them to their language, folks in Spain are actively trying to maintain a uniqueness to their langauge - case in point, the word for "computer". While most of the rest of the Spanish-speaking world is content with using the word computadora... folks in Spain have decided to use the word ordenador instead. And then of course, there is the fact that most of the English language is made up of words stolen from other languages anyway. Haha.
I mean on the extreme other end of the spectrum are folks like those in Korea, who are constantly using "words" that are little more than phonetic spellings of the English word that when you read it in Korean, is pretty much just gibberish, unless you happen to know English. I remember flipping through a Korean car magazine, wondering why in the world they would print what is literally pronounced as "poo-run-tuh en-jeen, reee-uh doo-rah-ee-buh" in the specifications box for a car that is "front engine, rear drive" -- I mean, there must be a way you can easily describe having the engine in front driving the rear wheels using purely Korean words.
Or even looking in this year's edition of the San Diego Korean yellow pages -- the whole middle section has a whole thing about golf, and golf techniques. It's just full of phonetic spellings of stuff that actually have purely Korean equivalents. It keeps saying "bol" for "ball" when there is another word for "ball". It says "goo-luh-buh" for "glove" when there is a Korean word for glove. In a diagram demonstrating the "interlocking grip" it literally has phonetically spelled out, "een-tuh-loh-keeng guh-reep" which in Korean means absolutely nothing, yet in the diagram pointing to an umbrella... it uses the Korean word for umbrella, "oo-san". What gives? And I've noticed that Japanese folks do some very similar stuff. Hmmm. Ok. That was my random thought for the day.
By the way, I know I've been kind of lagging on the updates. I mean i wrote a part 1 to the car show judging thing that I never followed up on. And actually, there's a partially written update from the week before that which has been sitting on my laptop computer but was never uploaded. I'll get those things up.... eventually.