Second post of the day….

I’ve said several times that one of Spain’s big pluses is that it doesn’t have the equivalent of the scabrous UK tabloid press. But what the media here does have is a sort of insensitivity which I suspect even The Sun in the UK would eschew. On the front page of one of Spain’s heavies today, there’s a picture of a blood-soaked woman dying in one of Madrid’s central squares, having been stabbed several times in broad daylight. Inside the paper there are more pictures and an article in which the paper expresses its anger at attempts made to stop their photographer getting his pictures. If this isn’t enough for you, on another page there’s a photo of the bullet-holed corpse of a Swedish journalist in Afghanistan. I very much doubt these pictures are shown for sensationalist, circulation-oriented reasons. Which makes it all the more odd, to me at least, that they’re not regarded as offensive. Ironically, I think it was the same paper which opined that pictures of blackened lungs on cigarette packets was taking things too far as it might upset people.

On a lighter note, Spanish wine growers say they’re not at all happy with EU proposals to pay them to uproot their vines. This policy is, of course, a reflection of the fact there’s too much expensive French wine lying around and the producers there would rather be paid for doing nothing than lower their prices. Spanish growers, though, would prefer to maintain their strategy of improving both productivity and the quality of their wines for sale at competitive world prices. But this is a nonsensically over-commercial idea for Brussels.

By the way, when talking about common sense among Spanish wine-growers, I’d have to make an exception for Galicia’s Albariño wines. These can be truly excellent but they're undeniably overpriced by world standards. I doubt there’s a bottle available under10 quid in the UK. But I’d be happy to be proved wrong. If you’re writing to confute me, don’t forget to tell me the name of the wine and the bodega. For the dastardly Portuguese also produce it but at much lower prices.

Tougher new penalties for traffic offences come into force next week. Certain stupidities – e. g. driving at 90kph in a 50kph zone – will carry a mandatory jail sentence. This has naturally led to speculation that 10 to 20% of Spain’s population will be languishing in prison by the end of the year. I certainly hope this includes the imbecile who crashed doing 130 on one such road in Pontevedra a few nights ago.

In answer to Chris’s question about the provenance of my statistics and their reliability – I get them from the media and I invariably believe everything I read there. Especially when the numbers are given to two impressive decimal points. How can they be wrong?

Gallego/Castrapo/Castellano

If this subject doesn’t interest you, you can check out now…

Jesus has written – from Angola I think - to say the Portuguese make a better fist of understanding Spanish than vice versa. I think this may be because, orally, Portuguese really is a tough language to get your head around, even if you speak one of the other Iberian languages.

As for Gallego, I thought I’d throw myself into these turbulent waters and try, once again, to sum up my developing knowledge. My perception is no one here speaks what the author of the article I cited would regard as true Galician, or ‘Galeg’ as he called it. Everyone speaks some sort of Castrapo, which is Gallego mixed with Castellano. There are several forms of Gallego, ranging from that proposed by the Galician Academy to the very varied ‘popular’ Gallegos of the 4 provinces and numerous villages of the region. The closest to Portuguese is a form of Gallego which has been artificially modified – in its pronunciation and spelling - to ‘take it back to its roots’. This is an approach favoured by what I think are called ‘Integrationalists’ here and I assume this strengthens their claims not only that Portuguese and Gallego are virtually the same language but that the former descended from the latter. It’s quite easy for a speaker of any form of Gallego [or even Spanish] to read a Portuguese newspaper. But understanding the spoken language is an entirely different challenge. My own experience is it’s slightly easier to do this with Brazilian Portuguese but still very tough. The assertion that Gallego speakers and Portuguese speakers can easily understand each other is rot. The languages started to move away from each other hundreds of years ago and, orally at least, are now very different. But it’s certainly true that, if you are a speaker of Gallego, you will find it easier to acquire Portuguese than, say, someone from Madrid.

So, having probably upset quite a few Galicians already today, I think I’ll stay away from the subject of the region’s Celtic origins and culture. And, anyway, what does it matter if people want to believe they’re more Celtic than, say, the Asturians and the Cantabrians? Not to mention the northern Portuguese, who used to be part of the Kingdom of Galicia. Back when they spoke the same language.