TRINIDAD JIMÉNEZ RIDICULED FOR NOT SPEAKING ENGLISH

Just days into the job and Trinidad Jiménez, Spain’s new foreign minister, is coming under flack in the Spanish press because she apparently doesn’t speak English.

I find this very amusing as nobody questions whether a British Foreign Secretary speaks French, Spanish, German or any other tongue. Whether David Miliband did or William Hague does has never been an issue – being British means you presume people on the international stage speak your language.

French used to be the language of diplomacy and by all accounts Miguel Ángel Moratinos spoke it well and could get by in English. Indeed it was said that Zapatero left much of the international liaison to his foreign minister because he is not gifted in the language department.

Poor Trinidad - there have even been those in Spain who have questioned whether she could speak Castilian having tagged her as pure Andaluz in accent and phraseology.

What is sure is that when she sits down with the chief minister of Gibraltar she will have no problem communicating as he of course like all Gibraltarians speaks Spanish. I have even heard it whispered he too has an Andaluz accent. William Hague can always rely on Caruana to translate for him when the three meet – which opens up the possibilities of all kinds of mischief if the chief minister was to twist what Trini was saying – and visa versa. As if!

It has been suggested by one publication that Trinidad Jiménez is an example of Peter’s Law – that a person is promoted until they reach their level of incompetence. It goes on to say that many of those in Zapatero’s government weren’t sufficiently qualified for the job.

I am curious that the Spanish media believes it foreign ministers and indeed premiers should be able to speak English, especially given that Spanish has long overtaken French as the second international language after English excluding Chinese.

However Zapatero was ridiculed for having gone to the Davos Conference in January where he had to have a translator at his elbow to translate what was said in English – the international language of all the politicians and business leaders gathered there. Indeed not only was Zapatero ridiculed it was said Spain had been humiliated.

It is obvious that the media have been digging in to Trini’s past as El Confidencial Digital has unearthed the fact that she twice suspended taking the exam to be admitted to the diplomatic school in 1986 and 1988. Well whether that is fact or fiction has yet to be established – but the minister’s press team have so far remained silent on the matter.

Previous blog on Jiménez and her Andaluz accent:

http://tiltingatwindmillsblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/contempt-for-andaluz-accent.html

PS: the government reshuffle also saw the exit from the ministerial ranks of Bibiana Aído. I wrote about her in February when she allocated over 26,000 euros to a project designed to explore the delights of a woman’s clitoris. I was tempted to say that now she is no longer a minister she will have time to put her own finger on it. Prospero, who is older and wiser than me said I shouldn’t, so I won’t!

http://tiltingatwindmillsblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/bibiana-puts-her-finger-on-it.html

SORRY, I DON’T SPEAK ENGLISH

The following conversations in SPANISH THROUGHOUT were recently held between a very friendly bar waitress and myself in a cafe in Estación San Roque.

Me: A beer please.

Waitress: A coffee?

Me: A beer please.

Waitress: A white coffee?

Me: A beer – I’ll have a beer without alcohol.

Waitress: You want a coffee with no milk.

Me: I want a beer!

Fridge door is opened and a bottle of Cruzcampo is waived in my direction. I nod my ascent.

Waitress: Are you English?

Me: Yes.

Waitress: Sorry I don’t speak English.

15minutes later:

Me: Do you have red wine?

Waitress: You want another beer?

Me: Do you have red wine?

Waitress: You want a coffee?

Me: Do you have a Rioja.

Waitress: A Rioja no. I have this red wine – do you want it with white lemonade.

Me: No – I’ll have another beer.

Waitress: Sorry, I don’t speak English.

15 minutes later:

Me: Can I have the bill please.

Waitress: You want another beer?

Me: Can I have the bill please.

Waitress: You want a coffee?

Me: I want the bill! The bill!

Waitress: Oh you want the bill – sorry I don’t speak English.

I should add that between the above conversations I spoke to a seven-year-old girl who I suspect is the daughter of the cafe’s owner. She told me very proudly she spoke English. We had a couple of brief chats – I spoke to her in Spanish – she replied in English. We understood each other perfectly.

There must be a moral to this story – but for the life of me I haven’t a clue what it is.

IS ZAPATERO “UN CATETO?"

A “cateto” is a peasant, a country bumpkin. In a recent column the distinguished journalist Francisco Rubiales asks is Spain’s Prime Minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero “un cateto”?

What has prompted his question is the appearance of the Spanish premier, who currently is also the president of the EU, at the world financial forum in Davos.

Davos is a prestigious event and Rubiales tell us that Zapatero has in the past been asked six times to attend but has always said “no”. This time he said “yes” but belatedly meaning he had to be shoehorned in to one of the secondary debates.

I have heard it said that because Zapatero does not speak English he has left his foreign minister Miguel Ángel Moratinos – who speaks the language well – to conduct the nation’s foreign affairs. Certainly at Davos Rubiales says that there were embarrassing interludes as the official translator had to interpret for the Spanish premier and then for the audience.

The inference is that Zapatero is an embarrassment to the Spanish nation by seemingly being so out of his league amidst the high and mighty of the political and financial world. In addition Rubiales argues that he has a low standing because of the abject failure of his financial policies in Spain and the dire state of the economy, unemployment and so on.

Of course as a Briton, albeit living in Spain, I bow to the view of Spaniards on whether they find Zapatero an embarrassment or not. True he is my premier also but I am used to British prime ministers speaking only English – but of course that is the key language of the UN and forums such as Davos.

So is Zapatero a “cateto”? Far be it from me to say. What I do believe is that whilst Britain’s premier, Gordon Brown, speaks English and struts the world stage, he has failed miserably to communicate with his own electorate – and it is they and not the delegates at Davos who will hand him or deny him the legitimacy of being elected Britain’s prime minister this year. A status he is yet to hold.

SO THAT’S FIVE (OR SIX) LANGUAGES THEN

Across the Spanish border from Gibraltar lies La Línea. The mayor, Juan Carlos Juárez, has called on the Trilateral Forum between Britain, Spain and the Rock to explore the creation of a bilingual cross-border university that will tap the region’s “rich and unique linguistic characteristics”.

In a statement Juárez said the university could draw on the backing of higher-education establishments in both Spain and the UK. “The unique circumstances of La Linea and Gibraltar offer a multitude of areas that could be promoted, for example higher education.”

All very true but when Juárez says bilingual what languages does he mean?

In La Línea they speak Spanish (Castilian), Andaluz and those who work in Gibraltar a dockyard patois of both Spanish and English plus Linense. In Gibraltar they speak English, Spanish although more often than not Andaluz and the Rock’s own language, Llanito.

So which two did he have in mind?

As they say in Gibraltar – “Esta tomate”.

TALKING OF ESPERANTO

When I penned my blog yesterday on Spanish and English my hand hesitated over the keyboard as I debated on whether to include Chinese and Esperanto.

Well I did the former and not the latter. I promptly received a comment from Brian Barker which can be read in full below yesterday’s blog. He stated: “There is an alternative to English (or Spanish) as the dominant World Language, and its name is Esperanto.

Esperanto is now within the top 100 languages, out of 6,800 worldwide, according to the CIA factbook. It is the 17th most used language in Wikipedia, and in use by Skype, Firefox and Facebook.

Native Esperanto speakers, include George Soros, Ulrich Brandenburg the new German Ambassador to NATO, and World Champion Chess Player, Susan Polger.”

I have known many people in my long life and only one of them was an Esperanto speaker. Indeed he was a fanatic but apart from those people he conversed with at meetings in London he was unable to communicate with any of us around him in that tongue as we only spoke English.

There are an estimated 1,500,000,000 English speakers world-wide and some 417,000,000 Spanish speakers. For Esperanto I found estimates of between 100,000 and two million speakers with only up to 2,000 “native speakers”.

What Esperanto lacks and both English and Spanish have is a solid culture behind the language. In both cases you do not just speak English or Spanish for by being able to do so you open up a rich heritage going back hundreds of years and that is being added to all the time. In addition the two languages gave to the world both Shakespeare and Cervantes – debatably the world’s two greatest writers.

In the unlikely event I have ever to speak to George Soros – I can do so in English. I suspect that apart from his native Hungarian and of course Esperanto, this high cultivated man also has other linguistic strings to his mighty bow.

SPEAKING OF LANGUAGES

When I was young, yes that long ago, we were offered French and German as foreign languages at school. In some schools Spanish was an option but largely thought of as being only useful if you were going to holiday in Benidorm.

French was the first choice being deemed in those far off days as an international language. Well how the world has changed!

Today English is still the number one international lingo albeit American English. Now even the French anglicise their language – le weekend – and everybody seems rather bemused that Spanish is the other pace-setter.

Spanish is the second or third most spoken language in the world depending on whether you include Chinese or not. Of course it is also a major language in the USA because of the large number of Hispanic immigrants.

Both England and Spain have one thing in common – they are the minority nations in which the languages they originated are now spoken. Spanish is the first language of choice for much of southern and central America whilst English dominates in the USA and Canada. This of course has led to variations of the original mother tongue with the word ‘coger’ having very different meanings in Spain and South America as ‘fag’ does in Britain and the USA.

On Saturday I popped in to my local baker who insisted that he count out my loaves in English – one – two – three – he said with a very satisfied grin. Apparently his son is learning English at school so he is listening carefully to pick up various words. I told him the problem was that his son would only be taught to count from one to ten. “Yes”, he replied, “I asked him the other day what was the English for twelve and he just shrugged his shoulders”.

As English and Spanish are now both major languages it is pleasing to note that the people of Britain and Spain are making such efforts to learn each others tongues.

There are those of course in each of our countries that have rejected English and Spanish for political purposes. Hence you find road signs in Welsh that nobody can understand and in the Basque, Catalan and other ‘separatist’ regions of Spain the local language is pushed to the fore.

Isn’t it ironic as the world gets smaller and English with Spanish take centre stage there are those who in the name of “nationalism” insist on languages being used that even their own people do not speak.