Cállate

a vocab word that’s Spanish, and one I heard a lot growing up.

When I was in grade school, the first few years at the school I attended* were all taught bilingually. Like, strictly and completely bilingual: from Kindergarten through 3rd grade, the 1st half of the day till lunch was taught in English only, then the 2nd half after lunch recess was taught in only Spanish (I think? It may have been the other way around but that’s how I remember it). It was great, for everyone involved; there were many Mexican immigrants (and migrants) that grew up in the same and nearby neighborhoods, and we all benefited by being immersed in both Spanish and English in school.

Because of this setup, I was fluent in Spanish by the time I was 10. By the time I finished 4th grade though, I was starting to not remember it as well, and by the time I went to junior high (that would be 7th grade, at 13 years old), I had lost the language completely.

*Actually if memory serves me right, my pre-K school also spoke Spanish pretty frequently, though it wasn’t formally or strictly bilingual. But there were a lot of Spanish speaking kids where I lived, and so Spanish is very often incorporated in school. I wonder if that’s still true in Boulder today.

It’s all Greek (or, French) to me

But I followed my friend into a French class in junior high (her dad was French and so that was why she chose it) and I excelled at French. I have to think it was because of my early Spanish fluency that French (a very similar language in structure and vocabulary, if not in pronunciation) came so readily to me. I got a bit rusty by the time I went to high school but I took it up again and it came back so quickly, I ended up skipping two whole levels of French class in high school: I went from French 1 to French 3, spent a month abroad in the south of France at a host family’s summer home, and came back to skip another level and take Advanced Placement French as a senior, earning college credits for my work and my test. Needless to say, I was fluent by graduation.

It could actually be said I was fluent by the time I was a junior and took that month abroad over the summer—I’ll never forget the time I was helping my host family set the table for dinner, I asked them (in French, of course—none of them spoke English very well so I was fully lingually immersed) if they needed me to do anything else. They all reacted hugely, exclaiming, “Whoa!! No! No, no, this is great, thank you! Wow…”

I was like, “What?! What did I say? Did I say something wrong??” 

They replied, “No no nothing like that—it’s just that right then, when you asked that question, you had no accent at all.”

I was gobsmacked. “Wha—I didn’t?”

”Nope, not at all. Now you do again, but right then you had no accent.”

”I have an accent??”

”Of course! You have an American accent.” 

By the time I finished my first semester of college, though, even though I continued my friendship with my French-descended friend, I was already getting rusty. I didn’t need to take languages in college, as I’d already done those credits in high school AP, and so I didn’t make the effort to add language to my already extremely packed course schedules. Which meant I wasn’t speaking it hardly at all. And so. I lost the language almost completely by my college graduation 4 and a half years later. I can still very slowly read with a dictionary nearby, and kind of understand most speaking, but.

By the time I got in to grad school, at the turn of the millennium, in a translation class, when I tackled large bits of Cyrano de Bergerac because I remembered loving that play in high school, it was such slow, slogging work. So much more of a pain to translate than it ever would’ve been only eight or nine years earlier as a senior in high school. I mean, in my AP French course I even translated Cyrano’s whole duel ballad *in rhyme*:

Je jette avec grâce mon feutre,

Je fais lentement l’abandon

Du grand manteau qui me calfeutre,

Et je tire mon espadon ;

Élégant comme Céladon,

Agile comme Scaramouche,

Je vous préviens, cher Myrmidon,

Qu’à la fin de l’envoi je touche !

*

I toss away with grace my hat.

I abandon slowly and with great art

My large coat, and lay it flat.

I draw my sword, that I will use to thwart.

She’s as precise as a dart,

As agile as my wit.

I’m warning you now, as we start

That at the end of the ballad I hit.

(Read the rest of my translation of the ballade de duel here, and the rest of the original French here.)

Quiet, Hey?

I swear I never knew how today’s vocab word was spelled before I came across it in the script for The Hombres, only a few weeks ago. I always assumed it was based on the word ‘quiet,’ like: ‘quiétè’ or something like that. But I guess that looks more French, even though the French word for ‘quiet’ is nothing like the word ‘quiet’ either. But. Only having heard it growing up, and being a very advanced reader already (yes, Virginia, even in kindergarten), I always pictured it written as a variation of ‘quiet.’ Because I knew that in my native language and that’s what that meant too. 

Shut up = tais-toi  //  Quiet = calme or silence

Don’t you say ‘calma’ in Italian too?  Is ‘cállate’ more about ‘calm’ than about ‘quiet’? 

Of course I learned the words ‘cállate’ and ‘sièntate’ in elementary school. They were some of the first Spanish words I learned, in that those two in particular were said to me a lot as a young kid in a big class. Not me in particular: I was never a huge troublemaker, on account of being severely bullied, but you can imagine how often those words had to be said to all of us, a class of 30 wiggly children, more than half of which didn’t speak the other half of the day’s language, and all of whom were living in various states of poverty. Well, there were a couple more well-off kids there, but they were the minority at that school—most of us lived in the poorer areas of town. The Spanish speakers and the English speakers. And the both.

Cállateclusion 

If you don’t use it, you lose it. If you cállate, the language disappears.

Capiche?