Month: August 2014

When people visit me in Paris, they’re always surprised to see a wide variety of non-French restaurants—Chinese take-out abounds, as does Thai and Indian food.  The same is true here in Guatemala—the restaurants include a Mediterranean place, a Mexican place, a Korean tea house, and some really amazing bakeries.  My first meal in Guatemala this time was at a pizza joint that some of my coworkers like.  Zipf’s Law affects the vocabulary of pizza as much as the vocabulary of anything else.  Here are the words that I had to look up in order to understand the very first, most basic pizza on the list:

• rodaja: a round slice; also a disk or a caster.
• albahaca: basil.

There’s an excellent Guatemalan restaurant in town called Tres Tiempos.  I spent an evening there eating tamalitos and a sort of Guatemalan hotdog and looking up the words on the menu.  How could repollo possibly not mean “chicken”??

• repollo: cabbage.  You probably learned the word col—so did I.  Don’t know where this one comes from.
• rebozado: battered.

Incidentally, if you’re into language and you’re into food, you will want to check out Dan Jurafsky’s latest book, The Language Of Food: A Linguist Reads The Menu.  Dan received a MacArthur Genius Grant for his fascinating work in natural language processing, and his talk on ketchup at a NAACL meeting is probably most people’s favorite keynote speech ever.  If you start out at smile.amazon.com, you can donate part of the purchase price to Surgicorps.

The first day of a Surgicorps visit to Guatemala is taken up with screening all of the people who show up hoping for surgery for their children or themselves.  The surgeons and anesthesiologists are quite heroic, and will see everyone who shows up.  (People also trickle in through the back door all week—I haven’t seen the surgeons refuse to examine anyone, regardless of whether or not they come on the mass screening day.)  Some people are there from early in the morning until deep into the evening, waiting in line with their little children, or elderly mother, or just themselves, undoubtedly hungry and anxious about the outcome of the screening.  Similarly, the physicians mostly skip lunch and work until everyone has been seen.  It all makes for an intense day, and for the interpreters, it’s the busiest day by far, as well as the most unpredictable one in terms of what you’ll need to interpret about.

I prepped for this trip by focusing on the vocabulary of hand anatomy and hand surgery, and had the good luck to end up working with the hand surgeon on intake day.  I enjoyed working with him last year, in part because he’s as kind, patient, and sweet as you can imagine a person being, and in part because after a patient described what he was there for, the hand surgeon would almost always begin his response with “We can make this better,” and I LOVED translating that—every time I translated it, I felt less crushed by the weight of all of the pain and deformity around us and more buoyed by the possibility that people’s lives would be improved by our visit to Guatemala.  Despite my preparation, I had to learn to translate nine English words into Spanish, and one Spanish word into English, plus two more Spanish words or expressions into English when I got finished with the hand screening and moved into the anesthesia screening room.  These words are notable in that the list contains not just one, but two, counterexamples to the “one context, one meaning” hypothesis, which claims that ambiguous words are not ambiguous if you can establish the context in which they are being used:

• rotate: hacer girar.
• espina: thorn.  This came up in the context of a patient explaining that he had embedded a thorn deep into his hand.  It also turns out to mean “spine,” in the anatomical sense.  So much for the “one context, one meaning” hypothesis.
• stabilize: estabilizar.  This was a tough one—it’s not even in my dictionary, and I had to go home and check WordReference.com to find it.  Related word: estable “stable.”
• claw: so, this is a really tough one.  There are four (four) nouns that translate the English noun claw, and three of them have come up so far this week.
  • Pinza is a claw like a crab or lobster claw.  This one came up in the context of “claw deformity”—we saw a couple of patients with claw deformities of the hand (see photo, from Tumblr).
  • Garra is a claw like an eagle’s claw or a lion’s claw.  This one came up in the context of giving instructions for a hand therapy exercise.
  • Uña is the nail itself—this one came up in the context of a woman who wanted her toenails removed.  (Long story—they did need it.)
  • Finally, there’s another word, zarpa, that I haven’t figured out how to use yet.

  So much for the “one context, one meaning” hypothesis, once again!  Note that the previous example was ambiguous in the direction of Spanish to English, while this one is ambiguous in the direction of English to Spanish.

• deformity: la deformidad.
• ayuno: fasting.  Related expressions, which did come up later, over the course of the week: en ayunas or en ayuno (yes, the gender is different): “fasting,” or “before breakfast.”
• trompa: in the context of anatomy, a duct or tube.  Trompa de Falopio: Fallopian tube.
• hormigoso: ant-like; full of ants; ant-eaten; or, in this context, itchy.
• cosquilloso: ticklish.
• buzz: zumbar.
• dissolve: disolver.

If you’ve read this far: how about a donation to Surgicorps?  It’s a wonderful group that does great work.

One of the first lessons of Linguistics 101 is: “Everyone speaks a dialect.”  We all come from somewhere, we all belong to some social class, we all have some gender, and all of these—plus many more things—affect our language.  To a linguist, there’s no such thing as a “standard” dialect any more than to a surgeon there’s such a thing as a “standard” anatomy—everyone varies.  To a linguist, there’s no real difference between a language and a dialect—as the redoubtable Ilse Lehiste put it, “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”

To a linguist, the term dialect generally refers to a form of language that is associated with a particular geographic area.  Although the terminology varies from linguist to linguist, we have other words for varieties of language associated with particular social groups (sociolect), people who share very specific activities (jargon), levels of formality and specific social contexts (register), and so on.  How you will speak at any given time is an interaction between the tendencies of your dialect, sociolect, the register, and so on.

Back to dialect: there is a cognate term in Spanish, but the denotation is quite different.  In Spanish, dialecto typically refers to an indigenous language.  As one of our surgeons, a native speaker of Spanish, put it the other day, referring to a patient in the recovery room: “even though I speak Spanish, I don’t understand him, because he speaks a dialect.”  This was a patient who spoke one of the indigenous languages of Guatemala.  Most of these languages belong to the Mayan language family.  There are about 29 Mayan languages, of which 21 are spoken in Guatemala by the large indigenous population—about 70% of Guatemalans are native.  (The rest are called Ladinos.)  The Mayan languages are about as similar to or different from each other as English and German or Spanish and French.  Patients who speak one of these languages and don’t also speak Spanish must bring someone who can interpret between their language and Spanish, and then one of the Surgicorps interpreters interprets between Spanish and English.  I’ve seen four patients like that so far in the past three days.

This leads to the question: if the Spanish word dialecto means an indigenous language, how do you say “dialect” in Spanish?  I don’t know the answer.  The Spanish Wikipedia page for dialecto discusses it as a technical term in linguistics, with the same basic meaning as the English sense.  (Note that as is the case in English, there is sometimes a large difference between the technical meaning of a term and the meaning of that term in the general language.)  There is a Spanish term jerga that translates roughly as “jargon.”  The Spanish Wikipedia page for jerga distinguishes it from “dialect” in that a jerga is associated with a social group or a profession, and is used either to obscure communication with out-group members (slang) or to enhance communication on technical subjects (jargon).  The search continues.

Arrived in Guatemala Saturday morning after two flights spent obsessively studying medical vocabulary and reading about health care interpreting.  I almost made it out of the airport without having to check a dictionary, but Zipf’s Law humbled me in baggage claim, i.e. before I even made it out of the airport.  Oh, well.

Getting to Antigua involves about an hour and a half drive.  Much of it is through Guatemala City and its suburbs.  The road is pretty much solidly lined with small businesses, many of them with hand-painted signs–Guatemala City has some very, very low-income, rough areas.  (In general, travellers are advised by guidebooks to just stay out of Guatemala City and go somewhere else.)  I amused myself on the drive by taking pictures of words that I don’t know—there were far more such words than I could capture on my cell phone camera.  Probably the most linguistically interesting was a huge advertisement for vaginal suppositories that was notable for the fact that it used a vosotros verbal form, which you don’t often see north of here (I don’t, anyways).

• faja: This was the word for the thing that your baggage comes in on–more specifically, faja de retiro de equipage (baggage claim carrousel).  Faja has a variety of meanings in my dictionary, none of which is “carrousel.”  They mostly have to do with things that go around something–sash, girdle, bandage, newspaper wrapper.
• cuota: I think this was meant (see photo) in its sense of a fee or dues.  It can also mean a quota or share of something, as well as a tuition fee.
• capilla: An interesting word, and I don’t know how to interpret it in this case (see photo).  One meaning is a chapel.  However, my dictionary says that another is a “death house”—I’m not sure what that actually means, but I think it has something to do with people who have been condemned to death.  There are additional, quite different meanings, and each of these has related words and expressions:
  • hood, cape: a related word is capillo, meaning a baby cap, a baptismal cap, a hood, a cocoon, or a cigarette filter.  Note that this is an example of two words that differ only in gender and have different meanings.
  • death house: an expression related to this meaning is estar en capilla, which can mean “to be in the death house,” but also “to be on pins and needles.”
  • chapel: a related word is el capiller, a churchwarden or sexton.
  • proof sheet: not sure where this one comes from, and I don’t know of any related words.
• almacén: I knew this word in its sense of “warehouse,” but it turns out that it can also mean store or department store, which was probably the intended sense here (see photo).
• ladrillo: a brick or tile. Why Guatemala is funny if you’re Bulgarian: Guatemala is a mountainous country with lots of curvy roads.  Curvy roads are marked with the word curvas (curves).  It will immediately be obvious to you why this is funny if you’re Bulgarian, or, indeed, from any Eastern European country that I’m aware of, Slavic-speaking or not.  If you’re not Bulgarian: it’s not blog-appropriate, so write to me if you want the joke explained.