“Spanish is a loving tongue,” wrote Charles Badger Clark, renowned as the “cowboy poet” and South Dakota’s first poet laureate, in his “A Border Affair” (1907). [1] A beautiful language, it is spoken not only in Spain, but in South and Central America, Mexico, the Caribbean islands of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic (D.R.), by Sephardic Jews in the diaspora. The second most common language in the United States,[2] Spanish is a universal language spoken across our world.
But the common denominator of a shared tongue does not automatically mean that native speakers can understand each other when they first meet.
As we are writing this post, we are in Buenos Aires to speak at a Christians for Biblical Equality International conference and to meet in person Aida’s digital, delightful, and brilliant Argentinian seminary students. Aίda is a native Spanish speaker, born and reared in the Dominican Republic by a Puerto Rican mother and Dutch father and, thus, fluent in Spanish, English (and a smattering of Dutch). But, since her vocabulary and accent are Dominican Spanish, not Argentinian Spanish, she finds pitfalls here in communicating when words that even spell the same way may mean something completely different.
For example, suppose we are in a restaurant in the D.R., just having enjoyed a full plate of one of the island’s special dishes of rice and beans and chicken and fried ripe plantains, with a fresh avocado just off the tree on the side, topped off with dulce de leche (a milk-based hard gel with a fruit center), and washed down with chinola (passion fruit) juice, so we can’t stuff anything more in. What do we do? We ask the wait staff for a factura and receive our bill for the meal. Ask for a factura in Argentina, however, after a fabulous big steak dinner with all the trimmings, and we’d be shocked to discover we’ve just extended our meal with another course as they serve us their delicious pastry, named with the same word.
Or, again, after we’ve paid our bill, and commenced digesting all those delicacies we just consumed and waddle out onto the island of Hispaniola to discover the Dominican Republic is now basking in the sub-equatorial sun, we may decide to ask for a guagua, since it’s high noon and we may want to take refuge in a bus from the hot rays. Often these autobuses (as they may also be called), both large and small, have Christian slogans spread across their back windows, entreating Jesus for safety. This is a very good idea, since Dominicans often drive at breakneck speed, swerving through Santo Domingo and environs, constantly blowing their horns. In Buenos Aires, however, we don’t ask for a guagua to help us get home, we ask for a colectivo, if we want to catch a bus. And these don’t blow their horns. They advertise “Mision Buenos Aires” on their backs. Since Argentines obey traffic lights but few observe crosswalks or believe pedestrians have right of way and colectivos forge on with determination, we end up running our meal off as we dash across all the streets without traffic lights.
Further, we missed out on strawberry ice cream for a few days, not recognizing “frutilla” (fresas elsewhere). We also didn’t realize peaches (melocoton in the D.R.) were duraznos here. Grapefruit (toroña in the Caribbean) is pamelo. But Aída sure enjoyed the huge 16 oz. sirloin steak for 21,000 pesos ($15 US). We were told “hay mas vacas que personas” (there are more cows than people in Argentina). We did not see them, since they were outside the city, with their gauchos.
Even more confusing than different vocabulary was a different pronunciation. The Spanish language of Buenos Aires has an Italian overlay and cadence. To us ingenues, it sounds like everything has a “ch” sound, for example, instead of alli (meaning “there”) pronounced “a-ya,” it is pronounced “a-cha”; instead of vainilla (vain-i-ya), it becomes “vaini-cha.” Almost every other word appears to be spoken with a “cha!” It is beautiful and melodious, two Romance languages intertwined and intermingled, but almost incomprehensible to these Spanish tourists. We kept saying, “que? (“what?) and “que significa esto? (what does it mean?). Despite our tiresome baffled looks, the Argentines we met graciously and with a smile explained their words so we could understand. They’ve had a lot of practice at this! If Jimmy Durante was still with us, he would feel right at home: “Hot cha cha!”
Of course, this is not a purely Spanish problem. We have a similar problem in the distillation we call “English,” which, as we know, is a kind-of composite language extracted from a German dialect, infused with French from the Norman invasion, salted with Gaelic, and shaken and stirred to produce the linguistic stew which we are now peppering with tech-terms.
So, language changes so much that “native speaker” does not necessarily ensure clear communication in any language in our global, increasingly technological societies.
A common saying for sometime now is that the young across the world are more like each other than they are like their parents because they are all in so much communication that they seem to comprise a new juvenile people group with its own language, its “young-speak.”
With words trying to keep up with technology, the emphasis in routine expression is increasingly invested in staying on pace with the language of mechanics, perhaps at the expense of other essential language functions. But speech is not the only way we convey more tender feelings to those we love.
One of the most moving examples of the non-lingual communication of love is described by the poet king David in Psalm 19:2-4. Here is our translation of what these verses say, “The heavens are telling the splendor of God and the firmament declaring the work of his hand. Day to day pours forth a word and night to night makes known knowledge. There is no speech and there are no words without their voice being heard.”
True, God has spoken to us through the words of prophets and, ultimately, those of the incarnate Christ Jesus, who is God-Among-Us, as recorded in the Hebrew Bible and the New Covenant (or Testament, including the eye-witness testimony about Jesus by those who knew him personally like Matthew, John, his half-brothers James and Jude). But God also speaks to us daily beyond language. The love that God has for us is imparted to us by the beautiful world resplendent around us. In the tranquil as well as the tempestuous sky and earth that envelopes us, God communicates to us the almighty God’s sustaining power. The seasons change, but we did not set them in motion. The oceans’ tides ebb and flow, but we didn’t stir them. The earth spins and moves in its orbit, but we did not set that in place. All of this movement was already transpiring before humans arrived and will continue to pulse and move while God sustains it.
In short: God communicates to us in a multitude of ways through God’s gifts and sustaining actions.
How should we respond to this? We should take a lesson from God and steward the earth by doing our part in creating an environment of kindness through our actions toward one another and the creatures that share this planet with us (as God commanded in Genesis 1:26-30).
In what may appear to be a very small way to extend such kindness, in Buenos Aires, in the place of “fair winds,” it must have been tiresome for Argentines to have to navigate our vocabulary and our accents to acclimate us to the living language in their world. But they invariably did so with grace and kindness and we appreciated the atmosphere they created within their place in the environment God created for us all.
Bill and Aída
[1]Published in the June 1907 issue of Pacific Monthly and set to music in 1925 by Billy Simon, Wikipedia, “Spanish is the Loving Tongue,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Is_the_Loving_Tongue, for the full lyrics see PoemHunter.co, https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-border-affair/
[2] See Lilata, 10 most common languages spoken in the U.S. (2024), https://lilata.com/en/blog/most-common-languages-in-the-us/
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