Wednesday, July 18, 2007 |
11:32 - Me llamo es
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Okay, this one has bugged me for a long time, and I've just never been piqued enough to complain.
Beginning Spanish students learn on the first day how to say "My name is So-and-so": Me llamo So-and-so. It's a perfectly natural phrase to start off one's Spanish education with—the class is getting to know its members, people are introducing each other, it's perfect: people want to know each other's names, so let's do it en español! ¿Como te llamas? Me llamo Brian! What fun!
And yet this is just about the worst trick that Spanish teachers could pull on their poor students, because me llamo Brian does not literally mean "My name is Brian". Llamo does not mean "name", as Greg Kihn happily maintained on his radio show this morning. Me does not mean "my". And the phrase Me llamo Brian is not mysteriously missing a verb.
The construction me llamo Brian means, literally, "I call myself Brian". ¿Como te llamas? means "What (or, really, how) do you call yourself?", and ¿Como se llama? means "What is it called?" Llamar is a verb, and it means "to call". The phrase me llamo is a reflexive verb form, something these bewildered, textbook-copying students won't encounter for weeks or months. And yet they start off being told that it means "My name is".
What's worse, few teachers ever bother explaining how the phrase works, what it really means, or why it's seemingly set up differently from everything else in Spanish; the rest of that first month, students won't ever encounter the word me again, and will be taught that the word for "my" is mi. Only later will they learn that me is actually a direct object pronoun, not a possessive—and only the really alert ones will make the connection, out of the blue, that it always was so, even in that odd first-day flashcard phrase they all learned by rote.
(The word for "name", by the way, is nombre—but mi nombre es Brian is about as commonly used in Spanish as "I call myself Brian" in English. They just do it differently, that's all.)
It especially pisses me off that popular culture does nothing to demonstrate any better understanding of this than a typical high school freshman—even when explicitly making a joke about it:
Brian: Hola! Um... me, me llamo es Brian. Ahh, uh, um... Let's see, uh, nosotros queremos ir con ustedes. Migrant Worker: Hey, that was pretty good, except when you said, "Me llamo es Brian," you don't need the "es", just "me llamo Brian". Brian: Oh! So you speak English! Migrant Worker: No, just that first speech and this one explaining it. Brian: You... you're kidding, right? Migrant Worker: Que?
Now, why would you write a joke like this that explicitly plays off of language literacy, where the whole premise that allegedly makes it funny is that the guy is a native speaker of Spanish—and not have the guy explain correctly how to say what your name is? This isn't some quirky exceptional Spanish phrase that doesn't follow standard rules—it's a perfectly normal grammatical construct that just happens to be set up differently from how we'd do it in English. Understanding me llamo requires only the knowledge that llamo is the verb "call" and me means "myself"—it needs a certain bit of educational buy-in, but is completely within the standard rules of Spanish grammar. And yet the guy makes like it's some special case where you're just supposed to remember by rote that "you don't need the es". Gaahh!
But, well, meh. It's not like Family Guy is some bastion of timeless comedy gold, nor—no matter how it likes to parade around dressed as such—a touchstone of cultural literacy. How far we've fallen...
(...On second thought, what is it with all this language humor involving the name Brian?)
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