“Sold out!“, says in large letters a sign in a neighborhood bar, below the reproduction of a Christmas lottery ticket. I mean, exhausted, that we don’t have tenths left, don’t insist. Anglicisms are frequent in commerce – and probably even more so in drinking – but I was very surprised by this one I’m telling you, perhaps because I saw it related to something as genuinely Spanish as the lottery and in an establishment called The Güichi and which, as its name indicates, is about Cadiz tapas: “In our menu you will find traditional dishes that will allow you to know what life was like in this city. [Cádiz] in its heyday,” says its website.
Although Anglicisms always give rise to much linguistic debate and controversy, the truth is that all languages, not just Spanish, grow, among other ways, by borrowing from other languages. Ours is full of Arabisms, most of them taken in the Middle Ages, it has some Italianisms, quite a few Gallicisms and, yes, many Anglicisms. Most of these are recent, from the last half century, although some date back to the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when the industrial revolution, which emerged in Great Britain with the steam engine, was full of new products, concepts and words. the entire civilized world. And what was the route of transmission of all that? The press, also incipient at that time.
Anglicisms were already frequent in the Spanish press two centuries ago. María Vázquez Amador, from the University of Cádiz, studied it not long ago – today everything takes us to Cádiz, where by the way the last International Congress of the Spanish Language, the IX CILE, was held successfully last year, and told in the article “Anglicisms in the Spanish language through the press of the first half of the 19th century”, published in the Linguistics Magazine from the University of Murcia in 2014.
Vázquez Amador based his study on a detailed examination of pages published between 1800 and 1850 in six newspapers that were relevant at the time: Madrid Diary, Gazette of Mexico, Mercury of Spain, Commercial Mail of Spain and its Indies and Echo of Commerce. He found in them 63 Anglicisms from 57 English voices. Reviewed with today’s eyes, we see that many have disappeared from our press and our daily speech (bushel, paylebot, coke, attorney…), but that many others survive: some with their original form, as crude foreign words (chairman, meeting, speaker, budget, music hall…), and others totally assimilated into our language, totally Spanishized: record, leader, tunnel, wagon, yard. The degree of acceptance that Vázquez detects of these Anglicisms is very high: 66% of the 63 Anglicisms found ended up entering, sooner or later, in the official Dictionary, which was previously prepared by the Royal Spanish Academy and is now made up by all academies.
We also see from María Vázquez Amador’s research that the necessary loans generally survive among us, those we take to give a name to a concept or a new object. What of sold out by exhausted It doesn’t seem very necessary, really, but in linguistic evolution you never know. Maybe in a few years, in that same bar that I’m telling you about, there will be a sign in which, in addition to ‘Sold out!’ say ‘Christmas Lottery Jackpot‘, which is how he tells me deepl.com -a very powerful German automatic translator that I use a lot- that we can translate ‘Christmas Lottery Jackpot‘.
I have put in deepl.com about “El Güichi” and I have driven him crazy. It only gives me one possible translation: “The Güichi”. English will end up borrowing from Cádiz. I have become calmer.
#Christmas #Lottery #Jackpot #sold
