With sharp edged, “excuse-me’s” we sliced through the crowds of tourists blocking aisles in the meat section of Alicante’s city market. In a back corner, fortunately only people from town grabbed numbers and waited in front of the two sides of a stand.
We were attended surprisingly quickly. The man removed chicken legs and chopped them into two: thighs and legs. “We just want thighs, my friend said.”
His reply? “You have to buy both!”
My friend hefted the package and paid, saying “muchas gracias” as she turned to leave.
He quickly responded “a usted” (to you).
Oh language. Even simple exchanges like this can call an ethnographers attention, especially when connected with other issues that speak to social change, or that are unexpected.
I would have thought, being Spain, he would have said ”a vosotros”, since there were two of us, and Spaniards seem to seldom use usted, and usually not ustedes, even in formal circumstances where I would expect it.
Since the stand is Argentine, I would have expected an “a vos”, but not an “a usted”.
I am also hearing Spaniards around here use vosotros to replace the singular usted, or tú” as vos already did, to a large extent in Argentina.
Despite what they teach in Spanish classes, second person pronouns are a scary fog filled with fast moving semi-trucks and annoying sports cars all zooming around you while you have to quickly decide which lane (pronoun) to use. Should you choose the wrong one, it feels like conversation can quickly snarl or even collapse.
What they teach in classes is generally true. Ud.—the abbreviation for usted—is the more formal pronoun used tor older people and more formal people as a sign of respect, while tú is used with people your own age and status and to those younger or lower in status than you.
These are “pronouns of power and solidarity”, as Brown and Gilman named them in a seminal paper from 1960 that still seems to hold for discussions of Romance language pronouns.
While that classic discussion lays out a useful grid in the background, it does not necessarily identify which pronouns you should use in every Spanish speaking country or in every situation.
To speak is to risk using the wrong pronoun or to make a social and political stance vis a vis pronouns, even if you are a native.
I recently saw a Reel where a Mexican and a Costa Rican, I believe, laughed at a Spaniard when he produced the word vosotros for the second person plural pronoun.
That is how it sounds to Latin ears attuned to hearing vosotros in the rarified world of the Church or among snobs who are putting on pretentious airs in their home countries. Yet in Spain it is in common usage and, even more, it seems to have shaken off the constraints of that web of power and status to a great extent. Vosotros now is the standard second person plural pronoun at the same time it has stalked and snared the singular Ud. or Tú in much daily conversation.
This came home to me last weekend when I, in a social gathering, conversed with a couple of Spaniards in their fifties, I think. The group also consisted of some Colombians.
I mentioned how people in Cali, Colombia seem to be taking the opposite tack. They appear to be losing tú and even their regional vos for second person singular. They replace it with a universal usted.
I commented I was hearing the use of vosotros here in Spain for that pesky second person pronoun.
They said they grew up using usted, and liked it, but that people here in Alicante especially of a younger generation get offended when you use it or tu with them; they demand vosotros. They spoke of a language shift in their experience to which they have conformed.
You can see why my ears perked up with surprise when the butcher said usted. It made me wonder if he was Latin American, but as I replayed his conversation over meat in my mind, the accent was not the Argentine of his mates in the stand. I do not know where he is from, but when I go back I will ask.
In the meantime, his usted, was casually lobbed into parting in response to our volley without a pronoun.
While I could extend this small essay with an extensive set of thoughts on the Argentine vos, for the second person singular, I shall avoid it.
Nonetheless, I will say that it is used in many other parts of Latin America besides Argentina. I fell in love with it in Bolivia as more intimate and warm that the dry and formal sounding tú which was less that the very distant usted in terms of pronouns of solidarity. Mexico along with its own set of conjugations.
One final comment: It seems to me that the second person set of pronouns in Spanish has been under heavy historical and contemporary pressure to change. It has and probably will shift.
I suspect this has to do with the complex set of relationships in which it is used within that vortex of power and social differences and needs to express similarity and solidarity.
Spanish teachers and texts tend to present this set of pronouns as set. As someone who has been using this language daily for more than fifty years, in a range of Latin American countries and now Spain, I do not see it as stable nor set in concrete. Instead it is changing in different ways and at different rates all over the Spanish-speaking world I think.
Unfortunately I did not hear the Argentines in that meat stand speak vos—maybe they do not use it as much when in Spain.
In any case the chicken we bought to make a pollo negro turned out to be unusually delicious.
No comments:
Post a Comment