All posts by sbsmith

On the Tip of My Tongue

In order to illustrate my relationship with Portuguese as a Spanish speaker, I have developed a metaphor. Imagine Spanish and Portuguese were identical twins. You have been best friends with Spanish for many years, without ever having met their twin. You can anticipate Spanish’s every word; you recognize the rhythm of their voice, the lines of their palms, and the shape of their teeth. One day you are introduced to Portuguese. As they stand side-by-side with Spanish, you are able to decipher small differences between the two. Portuguese might have more moles on their left cheek, their laughter is huskier, and their hair shorter. But, from a distance, they are near identical. It is then that Spanish departs hastily, and you are left alone with Portuguese. You make the wrongful assumption that those physical similarities will and should be reflected in the contours of their personality, such as tastes in music or political leanings. But alas, you are mistaken and left with nothing to talk about. Silence permeates the room, while across the table from you perches the appearance of intense familiarity, an intimate outline. Upon opening your mouth, everything rapidly becomes foreign and stilted, each question and response lingering on the tip of the tongue.

 

img_2354The weight of the nuanced differences between these two, between these “twins,” fully occurred to me when I read the yellow table above in my Portuguese textbook, which illustrates how prepositions and definite articles in Portuguese are often orthographically combined. I was forced to reconsider my earlier inclinations, wherein I chalked Portuguese up to be nothing more than a bizarre-sounding, formalized dialect of Spanish, the gawkier twin (perhaps it is, but that’s aside the point). I was confronted with the wholeness of Portuguese’s individual identity, its structural identity. As such, I want to propose the perhaps unpopular notion that there exists no real “comfort zone” in language. Within the context of the metaphor, many friendships are deceptive in their intimacy. I am naïve to assume Spanish has never kept secrets from me, or that their existence is contingent upon my own. Regardless of your perceived familiarity with a language, Language as a larger theoretical entity is fluid and reluctant. They, languages, do not reveal themselves to you in their entirety, nor could they if they wanted to, because much like people, they are constantly in a state of evolution.

I have been forced to abandon the notion that I can simply speak Spanish with an altered “Portuguese-y” accent and get by. I mean, yes, most of the Portuguese professors also have in-depth knowledge of Spanish and can certainly understand me when I falter or rely on one to compensate for the other. What I mean to say is that I have been forced to abandon the notion that language is a simply a tool of convenience, that it yields itself to you, that it is a means. My stumbling in Portuguese has taught me that despite the academic and necessary practice of outlining linguistic similarities between languages, to classify linguistic families wherein perhaps some of its members are rendered “twins,” languages have a tendency of asserting their distinctiveness, an assertion that is uncomfortable for the learner. But, to deprive a language of this distinctiveness for simplicity’s sake is akin to depriving the twin at the other end of the table of their personhood.

 

img_0098(1)Sawnie Smith is currently a senior at Smith College. She originally hails from Dallas, Texas and is pursuing a major in Spanish, a minor in Philosophy, and a certificate in the Translation Studies Concentration. It is her eventual professional aspiration to become a linguist.

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