Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Spanglish : The Making of a New American Language by Ilan Stavans ISBN: 0-06-008775-7 Publisher: RAYO Pub. Date: 16 September, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.2 (5 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: How do you say "bravo" in Spanglish?
Comment: Stavans is offering a new way of understanding language in the United States. His book on Spanglish shows how fluid words are, no matter the historical time. They keep on changing all the time. He says that only dead languages are static, which is true. He also proves how racist the "puristas" are when they suggest that people that speak Spanglish are "half-lingual" and that their train of thought is "broken."
I read this book from beginning to end in a few hours and loved it. It's worth every cent I paid. After thinking about what Stavans says, I'll never think of Spanish, English, and Spanish in the same way.
Rating: 3
Summary: Purists beware
Comment: The author compares Spanglish -- the hybrid "language" part way between Spanish and English -- with Yiddish, a mixture of Hebrew and German that evolved into the mother language for Jews in Eastern Europe. But I see it closer to Ebonics, an effort to put an acceptable face on something that should not be acceptable, an excuse for speaking badly.
Now, that is not a criticism of the book as much as it is of the concept (or the phenomenon) the book is based on. But to the extent that author Ilan Stavans promotes this lowering of the language bar, I cannot help but take issue with this slim volume.
Spanglish (the book, not the "language") is much more a reference resource than it is something one would read from cover to cover, with most of the pages taken up by a 4500-word Spanglish dictionary (just writing that phrase made my heart sink). But the introductory essay -- called the "Jerga Loca," or Crazy Slang -- gives Mr. Stavans' take on the issue of Spanglish, which he seems to see as a fully mature idiom. This is something that may or may not be true, but which gives me heartburn just to think about.
Take, for example, the wonderful opening line of Don Quixote: "En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme...." (In English: "In a certain corner of la Mancha, the name of which I do not choose to remember ...."). Mr. Stavans cheapens it to: "In un placete de la Mancha, of which the nombre no quiero remembrearme...." It makes my skin crawl.
I cannot deny Mr. Stavans' point that language is dynamic and evolving. Simply comparing the writings of William Shakespeare with those of Charles Dickens with those of John Updike is enough to prove that. Glance even at Miguel Cervantes, who spelled the same of his protagonist "Don Quijote" in the original. But this is a process that happens naturally and without encouragement, and it is certainly not served by lowering expectations to the lowest common denominator.
I do not give the book a lower rating simply because it must be judged -- at least for the most part -- for what it is, and on those terms I find it well researched and effectively written. It might even serve as an effective primer for "gringos" unfamiliar with Latin American culture and who want to learn to understand certain unfortunate Hispanic Americans. But I select three stars while holding my nose, because while the spread of Spanglish cannot be denied, I think that anything that promotes it just stinks.
Rating: 1
Summary: not much meat, but it's a tasty dessert
Comment: From its title and the author's academic background, I expected this book would be a more scholarly work. I wish that Prof. Stavan had paid more attention to defining and describing Spanglish and less attention to defending it against attack. After all, Spanish and English have been in contact for several centuries, and not even the most extreme purists deny that some cross-language influences are at least a linguistic reality, if not, as this author insists, a linguistic necessity. But just what is and what is not Spanglish? Stavan says (p.3) that it is the "tongue of the uneducated." In Puerto Rico, many highly educated bilinguals mix the two languages on occasion, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. I recall a Puerto Rican colleague in my university bragging about his son who had just graduated from what sounded like "jail" (Yale). My own native English is peppered with useful words like "tapón" (=traffic jam), "rejas" (=iron grillwork), and "tostones" (=fried plantains). The English-speaking operator for Banco Popular's Pay-by-Phone service asks you if you want your payment to take effect on "the next labor day." In the 70's, former Governor Ferre started one of his campaign speeches with "¿Cuáles son los issues?"
Prof. Stavans, an immigrant from Mexico, is himself is a good example of such an educated bilingual. In describing his early days in New York, he writes (p.2) "I regularly made my shopping..." where the monolingual English speaker would say "did my shopping" (Spanish hacer has multiple English equivalents). I counted no less than six cases in which he used "voice" (instead of "word"), presumably as a translation of Spanish "vox", as in (p.60) "Voices from the English used in Spain and the Americas..." Are these examples also Spanglish? If not, why not, and if so, is the uneducated condition really a requirement? The author gives us no clue as to where to draw the line.
The extensive Spanglish lexicon occupies 188 pages of the 274-page book, and it poses yet more puzzling questions. The author states (p. 55) "[Spanglish] is an oral vehicle of communication," then follows this with (p. 56) "The spelling I have in every entry is the one most commonly used in popular culture." If Spanglish is oral, where did those bizarre spellings come from (e.g., "benkenpura" = baking powder)? Unfortunately, no specific sources are given for the written forms, so we do not know if they actually occurred, or were concocted for this list.
In addition to such phonetic spellings of badly-pronounced English words, the lexicon also has a great many "Spanglish" items that are perfectly good Spanish words, according to my 1973 Simon & Shuster dictionary. Just among the words beginning with letter a are these: absentismo, académico, apelación, adobe, agente, apartamento, archivar, armada, asistir. Furthermore, several assimilated English loanwords (e.g. parquear, aparcar 'to park') were accepted by the Spanish Academy decades ago. Exactly what is Spanglish about them?
Despite these unanswered questions and contradictions, I found the book entertaining, especially the author's recounting of his exposure to multicultural New York and his tongue-in-cheek Spanglish translation of Don Quixote, which demonstrates just how clever the bilingual mind can be.
 |
Title: On Borrowed Words: A Memoir of Language by Ilan Stavans ISBN: 0142000949 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 30 July, 2002 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
 |
Title: Living in Spanglish: The Search for Latino Identity in America by Ed Morales ISBN: 0312262329 Publisher: LA Weekly Books Pub. Date: 20 March, 2002 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
 |
Title: Latino USA: A Cartoon History by Ilan Stavans, Lalo Alcaraz ISBN: 0465082211 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 05 September, 2000 List Price(USD): $20.95 |
 |
Title: A Crazy, Mixed-Up Spanglish Day by Marisa Montes, Joe Cepeda ISBN: 0439475198 Publisher: Scholastic Pub. Date: 01 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $3.99 |
 |
Title: The Dictionary of Chicano Spanish by Roberto A. Galvan, Richard Teschner ISBN: 0844279676 Publisher: McGraw-Hill/Contemporary Books Pub. Date: 11 January, 1995 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
