Dawn

Dawn

Friday, September 17, 2004

“Nationalism” in Spain doesn’t actually mean national, but regional - as in the Basque, Catalunian and Galician nations/regions. All of these see themselves – in various degrees - as successors to the original kingdoms which were shoe-horned into modern Spain. I asked a few days ago where all this nationalism would end. Well, we won’t know for a while but there was an instructive – not to say amusing – event in the European parliament yesterday. A speaker from Catalunia chose to speak in German rather than Spanish but so execrable was his accent that the Portuguese President of the session assumed he was speaking Catalan and told him this wasn’t an officially recognised language. I suppose a UK equivalent would be a Sinn Fein MP talking in the House of Commons in Norwegian rather than English. All very rum.

Talking of languages, my interest in taking on Galician after Spanish is beginning to wane. When I only knew a few words of it, I used to joke that it was simply Spanish with a single syllable in each word changed in order to differentiate it from Castellano. Sadly, this increasingly seems to be truer than I suspected and even Galician friends have begun to rebel against the artificiality of creating a language in this way, possibly in the interests of Galician ‘nationalism’. The sad truth may be that Galician really is just the dialect of Spanish I was originally prepared to accept it wasn’t. Which makes it all the more galling for foreigners thinking of living here that 40 per cent of lessons in Galician schools have to be given in Gallego. No wonder they baulk. And take their money elsewhere.

It is one of life’s little ironies – and there are millions of these, of course – that when an inconsiderate/unaware Spanish pedestrian actually crashes into you, no one could be more sincerely polite in expressing regret. This even applies to teenage males who have smashed into shoulder sinews that you have stiffened as they approached, 3 or 4 abreast and totally wrapped up in themselves. In the UK, you would [if lucky] be verbally abused but here you get truly profuse apologies. The reason is very simple – no one in Spain actually intends to bump into you. Everything is ‘thoughtless’ and spontaneous, including the apology. I had a marvellous example this morning, when I came into the peripheral vision of a young lady with baby in a push-chair. So spontaneous was she in reacting to ensure that I didn’t stumble over the push-chair that she swung violently to the other side, crashing into someone else foolishly trying to get past at the same time as me.

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