Orientation

By Rob Packer

In most of the languages I know, you describe the process of working out where you are on the map or in relation to your surroundings with a variant on orientation: Orientierung in German, orientación in Spanish, ориентация (orientatsia) in Russian and so on and so forth. The word comes from oriens, the Latin word for east, and creates an image in my mind of people lost in a forest or on the steppe bumping about in the dark until the sun rises and the riddle is solved. According to Wikipedia, the actual origin of the word is has an even more metaphysical feel to it, coming from the mediaeval tradition of putting east at the top of the map and Jerusalem at its centre, such as in the Hereford Mappa Mundi. The tradition of setting churches (and Roman temples) on an east-west axis could be an alternative.

The exception is Portuguese, where the word I’ve most commonly seen is nortear, taking its directions as most modern maps do today. This isn’t to say that orientar doesn’t exist in Portuguese (it does) and by the same token, nortear does in Spanish, although I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it used. So why the difference?

I like to think of it as a holdover of the language’s own history embedded within its DNA: according to the Real Academia Española of Spain, the Spanish nortear is mainly used at sea, where mariners have to navigate on the earth’s fixed axis. And the word has its origins in norte, a Germanic word, which (and this is pure speculation) makes me think of it as a word that sprung up from people communicating with each other in the vernacular, which probably dates it later—a more learned Latinate equivalent would be something like boreate or septentrionate. But in Portuguese, you could nortear your way around Rio de Janeiro just as easily as you could mathematics. It may or may not be the case, but I like to imagine the word echoing down from the pre-longitude Age of Discoveries, Vasco da Gama, Henry the Navigator and all the others, whose astrolabes would have orientated them in terms of their latitude, but would not have told them how far east or west they were.

Linguistic Showdown!

By Rob Packer

I was recently confronted and affronted by a friend of a friend. She was from Italy and may have been a plant to ruin my birthday party. It was indeed my party and I could’ve cried if I wanted to, but decided it unseemly for a newly 30-year-old man to blub in a pub in once painfully hip Shoreditch—these days surely merely hip and at some point in the far-off future, just painful. Tears were spared, but teeth were gritted and the anger only subsided when a very good friend I hadn’t seen in six years walked in like a ray of sunshine after the apocalypse.

Down South

By Rob Packer

It is a peculiarity of Brazilian Portuguese that capital and interior are opposites, which is—as far as I know—not the case in any other language. This is a surprisingly pervasive difference and seems to imply that all capitals are cosmopolitan metropolises, while the interior is a rural backwater or maybe jungle.

The Pleasure of Saying Yes

By Rob Packer

Disagreement is unpleasant: you have to change your plans, you get in an argument, and you don’t get what you want. Far simpler is just to avoid all the unpleasantness and go out of your way to avoid a negative answer: the British and the Japanese are just two nationalities of many stereotyped for doing this. After all, it’s far easier to call an idea interesting, than saying “No, are you mad? Of course not!” Compared to this, the affirmative is easy.

I’ve now been in Argentina for a week and this, of course, means speaking Spanish to shop assistants, baristas and the like—rather than just with my better half, as happens in Brazil. Apart from the odd moment of narcissistic bliss when someone inexplicably asks me if I’m Argentine, this has also made me realize that there’s something I’ve missed during these months in Portuguese-speaking Brazil: the pleasure of saying yes.

This isn’t to say that you can’t agree in Portuguese, but when you first learn Brazilian Portuguese* , most people will tell you that the word for yes is sim. This isn’t strictly true. What they save for the advanced class is that you really only say sim when you could never say yes in English. You actually say something along the lines of “it is”, “I am”, “lets”, “I do”, etc. (according to Wikipedia, this is similar to Chinese, Welsh or Latin). This means paying attention to the exact words being spoken to you: I know I use the wrong word a lot of the time.

On the other hand, Spanish does have a word for yes; it’s sí. You can use it all the time or repeat it as many times as you like. And the best bit is that—so far—it’s instinctive: unfortunately, that can’t be said for the other mistakes that the similarities between Portuguese and Spanish have had me making over the past week.

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 *I’m unsure if this is also the case in European or African Portuguese.