Comments on: Watch your language!

By: Dave

Dave — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 14:15:43 +0000

Good insight, Mike, but that doesn’t explain the pecado/pescado problem, and the cat was just a picture that I found on an Internet photo hosting service in order to grab attention. With Joseph’s allergies, I don’t think that we’ll be trying out any new pets that happen to have fur soon.

By: Mike

Mike — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 14:00:47 +0000

p.s. Is that Smokey or do you have a new cat?

By: Mike

Mike — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 13:58:25 +0000

Was it to trap foreigners or was the folktale invented by a man with a difficult mother-in-law?

Hey thanks for all the links! My Google PageRank is now 4!

By: Dave

Dave — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 02:59:25 +0000

Ah yes, the pecado, pescado mistake, very common, especially with missionary preachers. Yes, pecado is the Spanish word for sin.

That reminds me of one of the mistakes that I had made in Phonetics class. I was trying to say that my mother-in-law (suegra) was coming to San Jose for Easter Week, but it came out “cegua” (with a soft c) instead. It just so happens that the cegua is a monster in Costa Rican folklore. As a beautiful woman, she lures unfaithful husbands into giving her a ride home, when she then converts into a terrible beast with red eyes and a horse’s head. Sometimes I think that Spanish was invented in order to trap foreigners into mistakes like that.

By: Holly

Holly — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 19:54:28 +0000

Not a story directly pertaining to “God-speak” but when I lived in Alaska I took my 7th and 8th grade students on a mission trip to Mexico. Of course…they did the traditional youth group like skits and I narrated. One of the skits (I can’t remember exactly how it went) pertained to a chair representing sin “pecado” in our life…but I kept saying “pescado (fish).” I caught it after a few times when the crowd was chuckling and looking at each other and of course I said “yo quiero decir ‘pecado’. ” Woops! Of course, maybe “pecado” is God-speak too and I should have used “malas cosas (bad things)” instead!

P.S. “pecado” is the word for sin in Spanish isn’t it? It’s been so long since I’ve used Spanish out of classroom context! We don’t talk about their “pecados” in class…although we should!!