Read Languages In the World for Free Online Page B

bloque , another word for ‘neighborhood’. Sometimes, the gender transfers from the Spanish equivalent. Because la nariz ‘the nose’ is feminine in Spanish, one can speak of una runny nose in Spanglish ( una is the feminine indefinite article ‘a’), though at this stage no one would bat an eye if a speaker said un runny nose instead. English does not mark plurality on definite articles, but Spanglish does. Thus, ‘the munchies’ might be rendered los munchies in Spanglish. Gender for Spanish nouns is routinely assigned, but the particular assignments are not necessarily stable across Spanglish speakers or speech communities.
    High-profile inflectional morphemes from both Spanish and English find their way into Spanglish. The present progressive suffix -ing is widespread in English. The Spanish counterparts - ando and - iendo are also common. However, as flexible as Spanglish grammar is, speakers are unlikely to put a Spanish suffix on an English verb, or vice versa. The English verb to run cannot by itself take the Spanish suffix - ando just as the Spanish verb corer ‘to run’ cannot take the English suffix -ing. However, sometimes Spanglish speakers incorporate English verbs into Spanish phonology, as we saw with janguear .
    Similarly, reflexive verbs are common in Spanish and nearly absent in English to express activities such as ‘going to bed,’ which in Spanish is acostarse . The - se suffix is the reflexive and refers to the person doing the action, and acostar means something like ‘lying down.’ Thus, ‘going to bed’ in Spanish is the idea of ‘laying oneself down.’ This word turned up as a deverbal noun in the phrase al acostarse ‘at the time of going to bed’ in a medicine prescription issued by a Walgreens in Miami, which came with the following instructions: Aplicar a thin layer to scalp y forehead cada noche al acostarse por 2 weeks. (Apply a thin layer to scalp and forehead every night upon going to bed for two weeks.) An example of Spanglish earlier in this chapter included two reflexive verbs: “Why make Carol sentar se atrás pa'que (sit in the back so) everybody has to move pa'que se salga (for her to get out)?” Here the speaker nicely balances out the grammatical possibilities of the two languages, making the two Spanish utterances parallel through the use of the reflexive in both. Similarly, the speaker of the utterance: “ Apaga la televisión . (Turn off the television.) Don't make me say it again! ¡Ponla off!” is able to double the force of the command by marshaling two different verb constructions for the same action.
    (iv) The restructuring of the lexicon . In the utterance, “Man, vamos a la marqueta pa' comprar doughnuts” (Man, let's go the market to buy doughnuts), the speaker has replaced the Spanish word tienda and imported the English word ‘market,’ which is exactly what one expects when two languages mix. Because English has borrowed so many words from French, it so happens that Spanish and English share many cognates, given the common Latinate origin of French and Spanish. In the title of the Spanglish album El Talento Del Bloque by Farruko, a Puerto Rican reggaeton singer, the word talento is a cognate and is transparent across the Spanish divide. Sometimes, a cognate in Spanglish will adopt a meaning from English not present in Spanish. Such a cognate is actualmente , which in Spanish means ‘right now.’ In the Spanglish utterance: “ Fue al súper a las dos. No, actualmente fue a las tres ” (S/he went to the supermarket at two o’clock. No, actually, she went at three o'clock), actualmente has the English meaningof ‘actually, in fact.’ Such an utterance makes no sense in varieties of Spanish outside of the United States.
    The lexicon can also be restructured by means of calques . A calque is a loan translation, where the idea is