Friday, April 5, 2013
My Spanish Notes ¿Por qué no te echas un coyotito?
My Spanish Notes
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Posted: 04 Apr 2013 08:22 PM PDT
If there's one word in Spanish that probably everyone in the US learns, it's the word siesta. I doubt that I need to explain what it means, but just to make sure no one gets left in the dark, a siesta is a nap.
 Me voy a tomar una siesta, me estoy muriendo de sueño I'm going to take a nap, I'm really sleepy Those of you who are really astute may have noticed "I'm really sleepy" is not a direct translation of "me estoy muriendo de sueño". Literally "me estoy muriendo de sueño" is "I'm dying of sleep". Sure it's understandable, but we just don't say that in English, or at least I've never heard it. OK, It's time to get back on track. Tomar una siesta is a great way to tell people you're going to grab a few winks, but you're not going to impress anybody and it's kind of boring to be honest, at least when you compare it to some of the other options you have. Let's take a look at these other options. Echarse una siesta Antes de salir a la fiesta me voy echar una siestecita para recargar pilas Before I leave for the party I'm going to take a little nap to recharge my batteries A siestecita is just a diminutive of the word siesta. Use whichever one you prefer. Now we're starting to sound a little more native. But we're not done yet, we're just getting started. Echarse un sueño Voy a echarme un sueñito I'm going to get a little sleep Sueñito is another one of those diminutives and it comes from the word sueño which officially means dream or to be sleepy. You can also use the word sueño if you're not big on diminutives. Our next phrase involves the word pestaña, which means eyelash. Me voy a echar una pestaña, estoy muy cansado I'm going to take a nap, I'm really tired And of course you can use it in it's diminutive form. Me voy a echar una pestañita de 1 horita no más I'm going to take a little nap for just an hour, no longer So far all the ways we've looked at to say we're going to lay our heads down for a little bit are pretty neutral and should be recognized by all Spanish speakers, but this next one might be exclusive to our Mexican neighbors. Echarse un coyote Ahorita que no está el jefe, me voy a echar un coyotito Since the boss isn't here right now, I'm going to take a nap ¿Por qué no te echas un coyote? Why don't you take a nap? And there you have it. Three ways to say you need to recharge those pilas and one additional way to say it if you want to sound muy Mexicano. ¡Hasta la próxima!  |
Tech May Be Whistled Language's Demise APR 5, 2013 11:30 AM ET // BY JENNIFER VIEGAS
Still from the series "In the Americas with David Yetman."
MARK SICOLI
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In some remote parts of Oaxaca, Mexico, local men can carry on whole conversations across long distances of the Sierra Madre del Sur mountain range. Rather than shouting across the rugged terrain, they make themselves heard though a complex series of whistles.
Researchers suspect the whistled talk could be as old as the earliest languages. But while some young people in the Oaxacan Cuicatlán District can still speak the language, the days of the unique form of communication is likely numbered.
Modern innovations, such as cell phones and walkie-talkies, are now more commonly used for long-distance communication. And the whistled language's roots -- the Chinantec spoken language -- is also itself threatened by the more prevalent usage of Spanish. A recent research project, "Documenting Whistled Speech Among Chinantecans," aimed to study the language before it's too late.
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"Whistled speech made the local Chinantec language portable across canyons, fields and along the steep slopes where the village houses cling to the hillsides, making travel physically challenging," project leader Mark Sicoli told Discovery News.
"Such rugged, inaccessible landscapes are the types of terrain where whistled versions of spoken languages have been developed in places as far from Mexico as the Canary Islands, Africa, Greece and Turkey, New Guinea, and St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea," added Sicoli, who is an assistant professor in Georgetown University’s Department of Linguistics.
Sicoli and his team traveled to the region in order to document and archive examples of whistled conversations transcribed in written Chinantec and translated to Spanish and English.
Sicoli also developed a map navigational task, which asked one speaker to whistle directions to a second speaker to follow on a map. The successful use of the whistling demonstrated just how effective this unique form of speech can be.
Most Chinantec words turned out to have a whistled counterpart. The archive, for example, includes whistles that translate to sentences like: "Do you have any edible fungus growing in your corn field?" "Where are you going?" "What are you going to do at noon today?" and "I'm going to eat tacos for dinner tonight."
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"Due to its acoustic range, whistling can substitute for standard vocalized speech over both short and long distances, alleviating pressure on vocal chords and overcoming the difficulties of communicating long distances over difficult terrain," Sicoli explained.
A short-distance whistled "conversation" is more like regular mouth-puckered whistling, while long-distance communications may involve the sports stadium-type finger in the mouth whistling. The researchers found that the language is spoken mainly by men, although women often understand the whistled language, even if they don't speak it.
Daniel Everett, a professor of global studies and sociology at Bentley University, pointed out that "many of the world's languages may be whistled. English's limitation to consonants and vowels is a restriction to one channel of discourse, while whistled languages illustrate that human languages need not be so constrained."
Everett added, "When we study languages like these, we learn that the perimeters of human capability are more encompassing and contain more richness than we would have otherwise known."
It is unclear when whistled speech first emerged.
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"Hypothetically, whistled speech could be as old as the earliest languages," said Sicoli, adding that it could even have been a component of proto-language -- the precursor of human language used by earlier hominid species.
"Whistling itself is something that has been self-learned by at least one ape," he added. "Bonnie, a female orangutan at the National Zoo in DC, taught herself to whistle for what seems to simply be the pleasure of it. What Bonnie shows is that, anatomically, whistling would have been in the range of potential sound-making behavior of archaic Homo sapiens, including Neanderthal and earlier hominids like Homo erectus and Australopithecines."
While whistled speech is likely very old, it may be fading fast as technologies like phones and radios make it possible to communicate across long distances and as Mexico's main language, Spanish, infiltrates more of the country.
"When a language is lost, we lose knowledge of ways and content of human speech and minds that can never be recovered," he continued. "Thus parts of the puzzle of human identity and the joy of human experience remain forever hidden from us."
For a description and audio of the language, click here.
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