traduccion
Matt Kozusko (mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu)
Mon, 18 Oct 1999 17:06:14 -0500
Mattis Fishman wrote:
Hello, Mattis!
> Vuestro amigo,
> Mattis
I tried using the informal second person plural this summer in
Madrid. Nobody understood me. People just looked at me and blinked.
Of course, they did that pretty much no matter what I said, so who
knows what the problem was. Anyway, all of this interlingual
pondering reminded me of an especially funny thing that happened to me
in a department store off the Plaza del Sol. I was looking for a
particular pair of shoes that I have never seen in the U.S. but that
seem to appear in abundance overseas. I'd been through about six
shoes-only stores with no luck, so I began trying bigger stores that
had shoe departments. I had pretty good success finding shoe
departments by looking for signs that said "rebajas" on them--I was
pretty sure the word for "shoes" was "zapatos," but every shoe store
I'd been in at that point had featured big "rebajas" signs in the
windows. Same thing. Textbook Spanish versus real Spanish. After
mere seconds of wandering around this department store, I found the
"rebajas" section and, much to my delight, the shoes I was looking
for. As the shoes were being rung up, I thought I'd entertain the
salesperson with some idle banter. I ran over a few Spanish phrases
in my head to be sure I had them right before I attempted them. Then
I uttered, in Spanish, with great confidence and an especially crisp
accent, "so, zapatos and rebajas are the same thing, are they?". I
fairly beamed with anticipated success. It had sounded truly lovely.
I was obviously not a native speaker, but here I had demonstrated both
my eloquence and my savvy in the native tongue. The salesperson
blinked. Silence. I blinked. More silence. "No," she replied, in
perfect English, "'zapatos' are shoes; 'rebajas' are sales."
--
Matt Kozusko mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu