More Language Geekery
Posted By Sika on February 1, 2008
A couple of days ago I was telling my office mate, Jane, that sometimes, when I can’t think of a word in Chichewa, a Spanish word escapes instead. Jane said that doesn’t really help since nobody here speaks Spanish.
But that isn’t exactly true. Malawi may have been an English colony, but Mozambique was a Portuguese one. There are places along the M1 (the main highway) where Malawi is on one side of the road and Mozambique is on the other. Some Malawians travel to Mozambique to go to the market. And I get ridiculous images in my head of Mozambicans, during the war, running across the M1 to sanctuary and then taunting whoever may have been following them.
Because of the proximity of Mozambique, some Portuguese words have made it into Chichewa. The word in Chichewa for shoes is nsapato. The word for good or well is bwino (often shortened to bo). The word for passion fruit is granadilla. And, my personal favorite, the word for pepper is sibola, which is what the people at work say I should feed to the dogs so that they will bark and scare away an intruders. Since my dogs already scare the neighbors and irritate the hell out of me, I have made a mental note to never let the dogs get within 10 feet of any sibola. Compare those Chichewa words to the words in Spanish: zapato, bueno, granadilla, and cebolla for onion, not peppers, but they’re both spicy, yeah?, pronounced slightly differently (for instance, in Chichewa the ll is pronounced as it would be in English, not as it is in Spanish).
ETA: I’m not trying to say that someone who speaks Chichewa or Portuguese can also speak Spanish, or anything like that; it’s just kind of fascinating to me how different languages intersect in unexpected ways.
So how does Mozambique having been a Portuguese colony have anything to do with Spanish? Portuguese and Spanish are quite different from one another (common root language notwithstanding), and people used to one language will usually find the other unintelligible. Just like people who know Spanish usually won’t understand any French, or English speakers being unable to understand German, despite some words being somewhat similar.
Actually, I know a number of people who can get by with their Spanish in Brazil, and people who can get by with their Portuguese in Spain and Latin America. Not really well, but enough.
And while I can’t understand spoken French, I can read basic French because of the similarities to Spanish. I can read advertiser Portuguese, too, for the same reason.
At any rate, those particular words are similar enough in Portuguese and Spanish that I recognize them as Spanish when I hear them in Chichewa.