Treacherousness of Good-bye

 

At the moment, I am in a larger coffee house, one owned by an American—I am told. It is more attuned to an international clientele. I can see that in the subtlety of practices. Here, when people come in and out they do not say hello or goodbye. 

Is that because it is large or because it is American / International.  I do not know, but the combination leads to this lack of greeting and leave taking similar to Starbucks. There you simply do not expect people to enter and say hello or to say bye when they leave.

Trying to understand this exercises my professional mind—though I am retired. I have heard lectures and read articles about such things in a field called the ethnography of speaking, related to socio linguistics and anthropological linguistics more generally. For me, the focus is on the speech people actually use in different times and places and how they relate to social demography and identities. 

As I may have said here, since I have arrived in Alicante I have heard two different ways of taking leave: first adiós and, second, hasta luego. 

I would find myself getting irritated when people would say adiós to me.  My inner response is “fine, then, I will never come back.” because to my ears, Adiós carries implications of finality. It should be used for big leave takings where a good time or forever will elapse before you return to be together. 

My irritation led me to ask many people about their impressions. Broadly, South Americans agreed with my interpretation. And, to be sure, I realize that was where this idea was inculcated into me.  In fact, in saying goodbye there are also degrees of formality in some places.

To put it simply, hasta luego is more formal than ciao which is also widely used. In the US ciao carries implications of claimed coolness for some social groups, and Italian-ness, while in South America it is the ordinary goodby for most circumstances unless one wants to insist on status, your’s or the other person’s.

Of course, there is a rich repertoire of ways of saying goodbye, just like in US English. In my Spanish, there is nos vemos which may well be an anglicism based on see you, though that is not how I learned it. I learned it in Spanish as simply Spanish. The anglicism for me would be to say ahi te watcho, or nos watchamos. Sometimes, among friends, I will pull these latter—based on an English verb conjugated in Spanish “to watch” which replaces the English to see: hence I’ll watch you instead of I’ll see you. 

You start seeing here in my linguistic history some of the complexity of this little space of communication. 

Thinking about nos vemos, has made me think about Bolivia where ciao (or chau as it is often spelled locally) is the dominant way of saying goodbye, presuming some kind of familiarity or equality among speakers. You can also duplicate it to create the common formula chau chau, kind of like the English bye bye, used on many occasions from ending phone calls to saying goodby to people face to face. It implies a bit of warmth and solidarity. 

However, in the Aymara language, one of the two min indigenous languages of Bolivia which were numerically dominant when I first started going there in the seventies, the main and most common way of saying good bye I experienced was jikisiñkama, or jakisiñkama, the verb here is about meeting together or encountering each other. 

In the Quechua of Bolivia I learned kutimunkama, also until we return. In Cusco{s Quechus, on the other hand, while that is understood, I was quickly corrected with their form, tupananchiskama, until we encounter each other again.

In Spanish in Bolivia and Peru, I have heard, especially young people use the English bye when taking leave. 

Choices of ways to take leave taking bring in lots of variables of which I have mentioned 1) relative permanence of the separation, 2) formality or informality, 3) status of the speaker and the hearer—this also included perceived coolness, generation, and social status, 4) language and code switching, although subsumable in the variable of status, I will leave that for social difference such as class or ethnicity, we can also see status group membership such as rockers, generational groups, marihuanos (weed smokers), and so on, which also involve identities and social forms that cross national boundaries. 

I want to go back to the beginning of this ramble: the relative permanence of the goodbye. 

I already mentioned the contrast between ciao and adiós and how, based on that, I often feel when people say adiós they are telling me to go away and never come back. This has made me think about how I learned to say good bye in my home towns on the border and among Mexicans and Mexican American in Utah.  Adiós was simply the neutral way of saying goodbye, without the emphasis on permanence or transitoriness.

Of course there were other ways, such as ahí te wacho, from the English see ya I imagine, and so on. If that normal English informal way of saying Bye entered border Spanish, of course the road had two ways. Adiós entered English, without the accent and with a short a and an elongated o. Similarly hasta luego became English in some circumstances. In all of them, you could measure relative formality or informality, but none of them had that meaning of just go away or the implication of not seeing each other again, the finality of the Andean adiós. 

 

Frustration--Shame, Relief--Joy, Bolivia and Spanish in My Life

 Tomorrow, August 6, Bolivia will break into celebration.  In 1825 Upper Peru’s congress, meeting in the viceregal capital of Sucre, declared independence and named the country after Simon Bolivar.

The day will be one of speeches and parades, as well as politicking since the country is preparing for a national election. 

Today, the majority of Bolivians speak Castilian, as they call it, elsewhere it is more generally known as Spanish. At the time of the declaration, only a small but powerful elite and people close to them spoke the language of Castile. 

In the twentieth century it has spread, taking speakers from indigenous languages such as Quechua and Aymara in this land that was central to the Incas and to pre-Inca. civilizations such as Tiwanaku, as well as to lowland polities such as those among the Guarayo and Guarani. The country has been living an indigenous revival, but the place of Spanish is well established in government and society.  Spanish is the majority and the most powerful language

In the centuries since the Extremaduran Pizarro’s troupes snatched rule from Atahuallpa and his bothers and sisters, noticeable varieties of Spanish have developed within Bolivia  that are distinctive and yet are still poorly studied, though valiant efforts are underway. 

While one can try to follow the genealogy of various features back to regions in Spain, immediately one becomes aware of the language’s hybridity. It grew for hundreds of years in the cradle of the amazing Aymara (Jaqi-aru) and the also grand Quechua (Runasimi) worlds.

Though Bolivians insist Aymara is an original language of their land, linguists increasingly point to a relative lack of diversity in this language within Bolivia, certainly when compared with the mountains above Lima, Peru. They note that even today, despite its use among farmer’s in Bolivia and altiplano Peru, across the southern Andes, the language is associated with llama herders of the highlands and argue it came to Bolivia relatively recently becoming one of the two main indigenous languages, along with Quechua, associated with mining and valleys. It also came fairly recently.

There was an earlier language that probably was the first language of the Incas and probably of Tiwanaku, an Arawak tongue Variously called Puquina or Uru that probably came up from the lowlands. It has relatives spoken even today in the Caribbean—Arawak 

While Bolivia has made these languages official and requires officials to demonstrate competency in one of them, Bolivia’s Castellano is fascinating. It has a distinctive grammar and phonology, although teachers in Bolivia may insist on the Royal Spanish Academy’s version.

The highlands of Bolivia and similar areas of Peru, are almost the only areas of the Spanish world—itself a set of distinctive versions organized in some sort of political relationship with the Royal Spanish Academy version of the formal language—where ll retains its pronunciation as ly rather than simply y. (I must note that the last few times I was in La Paz, the seat of national government, i heard y where ll would have been.) 

Curiously, the other place where this ponunciation of ll is maintained is where I now live, in Valencia, as well as in Catalonia although not in Castellá, as Spanish is called, but in Valencian-Catelan. Nonetheless Spanish speakers here tend not to use it and hence simplifyy vowel clusters where the ll or a forceful y, as spelled, would tend to separate them.  

In the highland speech of Bolivia, where the majority of the population lives, the s is never dropped or turned into an aspirant, although in the lowlands that happens. Dropping the s after vowels is extremely common here in southern Spain—as it js in lowland Latin America—though not in the north. 

Highland Bolivian speech never drops consonants, unlike almost every other Spanish dialect. Instead they can elide vowels between consonants, following the practice of Aymara creating rather complex consonant clusters, e.g. toditos becomes tdits.

I could write more about the phonology of Bolivian speech in which I was inserted for two intense years as a nineteen year old and to which I returned many times up until recently. The pressure of Bolivian weakened my native northern Mexican pronunciation and, now that I have reengaged with Mexico, my speech is an unconscious or semiconscious hybrid of the two regions.

As someone formed in a New Mexican town (Las Vegas) and then in El Paso-Ciudad Juarez, with that intense Bolivian experience I am grounded in what is often called the Highland set of dialects, those of the old colonial capitals and surrounding regions. Only recently have I come to spend more time in what are called the lowland or coastal dialects whose features of pronunciation are quite different. 

I recognize their importance and have spent time in Cali, Colombian studying their phonology. I wish I knew more of their history. I am amazed by them, but they frustrate me day in and day out as language does to someone who starts to learn it in their sixties. 

In Colombia, and now in Spain, I have been told that my pronunciation is like that of the persons who dub movies into Spanish, i.e. neutral. This latter is a highly arguable form speaking to a created, artificial Spanish more related to elite norms than to those of the ordinary people of the Caribbean basin. 

After having had my native New Mexican and then my Bolivian pronunciation heavily criticized in the University, I may have subconsciously adopted that norm as I tried to learn the prestige code of University life in Spanish, when I never studied in a Spanish speaking institution of Higher Education, though I have lectured and even taught in a few. 

From that experience of speaking non-normative dialects of Spanish and suffering criticism and then struggling to pass comes part of my feelings around living here in Mediterranean Spain. I am challenged daily by dialects I only partially, although increasingly understand (Colombian Venezuelan as well as ones from Southern Spain) dialects whose very legitimate treatment of consonants makes understanding difficult for me.

The daily frustrations (though not the daily successes and joys) came to ground  in the poem I posted yesterday (In the Green Grocers) in the image of mud, something that is neither earth nor water, or ni chicha ni limonada in my Spanish, something. I could no easily make sense of. 

I apologize for how that image offends people who may have had their Spanish criticized by the  armed guardians of the proper or the official.

For me this is a lesson in the difficulty of writing precisely and concisely in a space filled with arguments and power about what is acceptable and what not. 

I am perhaps slowly. learning the Spanishes of the region in which I live. But that does not take away they immense feeling of relief when conversing with someone whose speech is clear and understandable with no effort to me. Such as when I return to the US Southwest or northern Mexico, or to Bolivia-Peru.

Those two sensations, frustration-shame and relief-joy are part of my experience of living in Spain as a Spanish speaker.  Jallalla Bolivia, Qué viva Bolivia.  Long live Bolivia. 

The Senses of the Street

Cusco, Perú

July 2003

Yesterday was a day of errands.  But errands with a sensuality that is at once new and old.  It is not that of home and has not yet become so omnipresent as to pass into the background, uncommented and unnoticed.  

Once and Future Name

Officially two cities, La Paz and El Alto join where the very high plateau crumbles into a deep gorge with very steep walls. That edge that is gradually collapsing is called the ceja, the eyebrow, as if El Alto were the crown of the head and La Paz the steep and falling cheeks against the solid jaw.