Notes on the "habla"

For all you hispanohablantes or general Spanish language enthusiasts, this is my entry on Latin-American slang and indigenous peoples.

So last month I went to go see a showing of a low-budget film called Peces de Ciudad by Peruvian director Felipe Degregori about the indigenous people of Peru who have either been driven from their homes in the highland villages either by political violence or by lack of economic opportunity.  These Indians move to Lima, where they live in depressed slums without electricity or running water.  Houses are made of straw, cardboard, plywood, and corrugated tin.  Indians suffer a tremendous deal of racial discrimination in Lima, and are called a variety of derogatory names: charapa, cerrana (as in cerro or "hill"; literally, "hillbilly") and cholo among others.

So I went to Google these names after I saw the movie.  The first hit for charapa?  An entry on Quechua Wikipedia!  I had no idea that a Wikipedia in Quechua (a language of the indigenous peoples of the Andes and a direct descendant of the language of the Incan empire) even existed, so this was as a pretty exciting discovery for me.  I had to figure out myself, too, what language it was--that NACLO practice exercise with Quechua finally came in handy!

It turns out charapa is a Quechua word for turtle.  Apparently this is an insult directed towards Indians in Peru.  Another word used is cholo, which surprised me because it means something entirely different in Mexico and in the United States (something like "Mexican gangster," which, like "nigger" probably began as a derogatory word and eventually was reappropriated by the group to which it originally referred).  So, I went to Urban Dictionary for some clarification.  Some entries do mention its use as a derogatory term for Indians in Andean countries.  Another definition clearly only references the Mexican-American meaning, but also offered a source of its origin.

"Like many words that originated in Latin Americas--tomate, chocolate, etc.--the word cholo originated from the Nahuatl language and was eventually Hispanicized.  The original word was Xoloitzcuintli, where the X is pronounced somewhere between the English SH and CH.  The Spanish had no letter for this sound and used the X as a placeholder.  Xoloitzcuintli is the native breed of Mexican hairless dog was valued by the Mextica (Aztec) and Mayan natives.  The Spaniards used the shortened version of this word, Xolo, to mean "Mexican dog" with derogatory conotations [sic] when used by Anglos or Mexicans, as noted in previous definitions." 

This seemed to good to be true to me, so I decided to e-mail the professor of my Mesoamerican  Art & Architecture class, who is familiar with Nahuatl languages (once the tongue of the Aztecs) to ask whether or not this etymology seemed legitimate or plausible.  (As an aside, we have a ton of Nahuatl speakers here in New Haven.  You don't have to go much further than the local supermarket to hear Nahuatl spoken, since there's a large Mexican Indian immigrant population.)  Here was her reply:

"There are lots of words in Mexican Spanish from Nahuatl, almost all of them nouns (like most loan words).  My favorite is pocho--quite fascinating word origin.  I think the derivation below is correct.  Too bad the spelling of 'connotation' is wrong.  Perhaps you'll go in and fix it."  

There you have it!  I'll leave you all to look into pocho...

--Amy

Counting Your Words

Erica recently called to my attention this great article in The New York Times about the work of University of Texas psychology professor James W. Pennebaker.  He counts the number and type of words (using a computer program called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count or LIWC) used by an individual to see what it can tell us.  Pennebaker's approach is unique in that it's a departure from traditional text analysis, which he says, "is really more interested in context, how sentences are put together and what a meaningful phrase," whereas his approach "is simply counting words."  He has used his software to analyze the number of first person pronouns used by Al Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahiri to demonstrate a shift in his relationship with Osama bin Laden.

Pennebaker has also used his counting technique to analyze the speeches of the 2008 presidential candidates (the link: http://wordwatchers.wordpress.com).  He posits that the way each candidate uses language can tell us something about how he thinks (and from there we can analyze the difference between the way each approaches problems).  Here's a choice excerpt:

"Whereas McCain tends to be more categorical in his thinking, Obama is more fluid or contextual in the ways he approaches problems.  Categorical thinking involves the use of concrete nouns and their associated articles (a, an, the) and suggests that the person is approaching a problem by breaking it down into its component parts and attempting to put it in meaningful categories.  Fluid or contextual thinking involves a higher rate of verbs and associated parts of speech (such as gerunds and adverbs)."

--Amy

Overheard: "Legitly"

Hey, guys! Since I know we're all abbreviation-happy, I thought I might report that I have heard the word "legitly" spoken on the Yale campus twice this week. It's a combination of the word "legit" (as in the abbreviation of the word "legitimate") with an "-ly" tacked on to make it an adverb. My suitemate from North Carolina used the word once at dinner, and then a couple of days later I heard it used again, interestingly enough, by a middle-aged male construction worker (a vastly different kind of speaker than a college-age female from the South).

It really piqued my interest, since it's clear neither the construction worker nor my suitemate was using "legit" consciously--as a curiosity or a novel slang word. Rather, the word had sunk at some point into their mental word banks, and when it was uttered, was treated by the brain as any other common morpheme, following the same English morphological rules (take an adjective and tack on "-ly" to make an adverb).  Now that's legitly interesting!

--Amy