Adventures in Second Person Fog

 

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. 

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.