Interesting, But Disappointing: a Review of The Llanito Dictionaries
By Charles Durante
Dr Johnson famously wrote, ‘lexicographer: a writer of dictionaries: a harmless drudge.’ In the publication mentioned above we have four ‘drudges:’ Tito Vallejo-Smith, Manuel Cavilla, Johannes Kramer and Juan Manuel Ballesta Gómez, henceforth referred to as TVS, MC, JK, and JMBG, respectively. Though Johnson was being self-deprecatory, having himself devoted many hours to producing a massive dictionary, our ‘drudges’ are to be thanked for attempting to encode Llanito, collecting vocabulary, providing definitions and tracing provenance.
The Llanito Dictionaries is the result of a task undertaken by Rebecca Calderon at the behest of Gibraltar Cultural Services, to collate and republish the dictionaries compiled by the authors mentioned in the opening paragraph. Rebecca herself describes the ‘arduous task’ of ‘scanning, converting files and compiling a new Llanito dictionary,’ in an essay she wrote for the Llanito pamphlet brought out by Patuka Press earlier this summer. The upshot of this endeavour is a handy book which will enable us to consult, study and learn about our language in what should have been a more user-friendly format. However, I must enter an initial caveat: the font used is small, verging on the minute, making an extensive reading trying on the eyes. Understandably, dictionaries must include a great deal of information, and a smaller font is helpful, but not to the detriment of the reader’s eyesight.
All four dictionaries are showing signs of old age. The pioneering work of MC (and we owe him a large debt for instigating the whole process of casting Llanito into the dictionary format) appeared in 1978, well before the digital revolution and the setting up of the Internet. JK’s book, a more ambitious work, includes historical and linguistic notes, though Rebecca’s version, following the remit she was given, restricts itself to the dictionary section, was published in 1986. JMBG’s book, much less ambitious, at least judging by the section quoted in the Llanito Dictionaries, came out contemporaneously with JK’s, in 1986. The most recent, TVS’s, provides more coverage and appeared in 2001.
Dictionaries age very quickly so that most publishing firms now opt for a digital version which can be updated as the need arises. My title refers specifically to this phenomenon: here was an opportunity to update, correct, amplify and smarten the extant dictionaries. Instead, the old format, the antiquated vocabulary, the old prescriptive philosophy, have been preserved as if language studies had ceased to develop. Our four dictionaries are now museum pieces, admittedly with incalculable social value, reflecting the state of Llanito in the seventies and eighties, but failing to provide us with a state of the art, contemporary view of our language.
Maybe the aim was simply to make the dictionaries available to the reading public, with no intention to broaden their scope and relevance. A worthy proposal, but in the long term, myopic and narrow. The whole world of language recording, study and dissemination has undergone a revolution which has left our extant dictionaries behind.
One compelling reason for correcting the dictionaries is the presence of solecisms which render some of the entries unreliable. TVS claims that ‘curiana’ should be ‘cucaracha.’ But ‘curiana’ is acceptable in standard Spanish (vide the Diccionario de la lengua española of the Real Academia). Then we are informed that ‘chisme’ means gossip. Correct, but the entry then goes on to condemn the use of the word to refer to old junk or objects. But the Academia supports the meaning ‘baratija o trasto pequeño.’ The presence of a single mistake in a dictionary renders the whole undertaking suspect.
MC’s dictionary belongs to an age when public discourse was still ruled by considerations of propriety and decorum. He defines ‘chochi’ as ‘nombre cariñoso que se le da, generalmente, a las niñas pequeñas.’ The other lexicographers are less reticent and unashamedly refer to ‘a woman’s private parts.’ MC’s definitions are generally accurate, though very succinct. There is only one example where his lexicographer’s instinct lets him down and that is when he defines ‘queso de plato’ as ‘queso que no es de bola ni de porciones.’ Defining a word in this negative manner is not illuminating or helpful.
Though the entries from JMBG’s book are few, he has included two beautiful lexemes which don’t figure in the other dictionaries — words which have a distinctively Gibraltarian flavour: ‘leveche, viento del sudoeste’ which is traced to the Italian ‘libeccio,’ and ‘pavana’ (Spanish ‘gaviota’), seemingly related to the measured tread of the seagull, reminiscent of the pavane dance, originating in ‘pavo,’ a dialect name for the city of Padua.
TVS has some fascinating entries which evoke a world long gone. Under ‘miserere del dolor,’ he explains that the phrase seems to refer to painful deaths ‘for which the illness was not known.’ This sounds plausible but does not account for the Latin word ‘miserere.’ TVS thinks the word is Latin for mercy or pity, but the word would then be ‘misericordia.’ Moreover, ‘miserere’ is a verb not a noun. The following is pure speculation, but the most famous use of the word ‘miserere’ is as the first word of Psalm 50. Could the phrase refer to the recital of the psalm when a poor sufferer was in his death throes?
A certain amount of correction and emendation has improved some of the entries. TVS has no accents in his 2003 edition, but they have been introduced in The Llanito Dictionaries, though not always consistently. The other three dictionaries have included accents, thus helping the reader pronounce the words correctly. Ideally, the notation of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) should have been used, the standard method to indicate pronunciation, though JK does employ some of the symbols of the IPA.
The Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, drew an important distinction between ‘parole’ and ‘langue’ which can be applied to the work of our four lexicographers. They have captured Llanito at a particular moment in its evolution, easily confirmed by the date of their respective publications. Saussure calls this the synchronic aspect of language. Presumably, their choice of words reflected the language as it was being used at the time, though some of the words must have seemed already obsolete as they don’t seem to have become current at any time. This is an example of language as ‘parole’, the form of the language used by individual speakers in everyday situations. ‘Langue’ refers to the overarching scheme of the language. Again, Saussure has a name for this: the diachronic aspect of language; language seen as developing historically. This is an important area of language study which our dictionaries seldom tackle.
Many headwords are followed by ‘mala pronunciación de…’ or ‘debería ser…..’ These locutions betray a prescriptive understanding of language which is now considered dated and no longer acceptable in modern linguistic circles. This approach just perpetuates the old chestnut that Llanito is ‘bad English and worse Spanish.’ But we know this mistaken notion smacks of linguistic snobbery and an inability to accept a language for itself, with its own turns of phrase, grammar and lexicon. A dictionary is supposed to be authoritative in as far as it encapsulates the state of the language at any given moment, but formulating inflexible rules is no longer its task. Style guides and curmudgeonly grammar gurus now dictate these rules, which are usually defied by usage and the interaction of everyday conversation. The old-style dictionaries tried to preserve the language in amber, but we now know that language has its own way of evolving and keeping meanings and communication clear and efficient.
It's a pity that none of the four dictionaries involved refers to written forms of Llanito. In the last few years, there has been a veritable explosion of stories, essays, poems and other forms of writing, expressed in Llanito. If the compilers of the new dictionary had taken this into account, the new publication could have reflected the state of the language now and shown how spoken Llanito and written Llanito do not always coincide. Instead, nearly all the entries are based on the way Llanito was spoken decades ago!
In his introduction, TVS mentions ‘siseo’ and ‘ciceo’ (sic). These two words relate to the way certain sounds are pronounced in Andalusian Spanish and, by extension, in Gibraltar also. However, the correct forms of these words are ‘seseo’ and ‘ceceo.’ The former describes how words with a ‘z’ or ‘c’ in Spanish, which should be sounded like the ‘th’ in ‘thin,’ are pronounced as an ‘s.’ Thus ‘servesa’ instead of ‘cerveza.’ This is just one example of what could have been improved if Gibraltar Cultural Services had engaged language experts to revise the dictionaries before they were amalgamated by Rebecca Calderon.
A full dictionary entry usually includes the following aspects of a language: spelling, word class, usage, meaning, etymology, pronunciation and register. None of our dictionaries has embraced this extensive coverage; instead, they limit themselves to defining the word and relating it to its Spanish or English origin. Again, more careful planning and thought before commissioning Rebecca to do her job, could have remedied this. We would now have a state of the art, updated, linguistically sophisticated, comprehensive guide to current Llanito.
The extracts from JK’s book, English and Spanish in Gibraltar, are scholarly and reliable. He consulted MC’s dictionary and acknowledged his debt. He then expanded his research to include a reading of Gaetano Frisoni’s Dizionario moderno Genovese-Italiano so that his section on words with an Italian derivation is particularly full and detailed. JK arranges his entries under different headings, as in a thesaurus, thereby making it easy to consult and appreciate how many words fall into a specific category. An example of JK’s approach is clearly visible in his generous entry on the word ‘camalo’, a porter, from the Genoese ‘camalo,’ a word he traced in Frisoni’s dictionary mentioned above. He then extrapolated from an Italian to a Spanish dictionary, quoting Corominas’ famous dictionary where, interestingly, he stumbled across the same word, used by the Sephardic community in Morocco, to designate a Jewish porter. He then added a further layer of meaning by including the Arabic word for porter, ‘hammal,’ which the Glosario de Haquetía y Ladino-Judezmo of Tomás Ramírez Ortiz, defines as ‘mozo de cordel’ (de ahí viene la voz haquítica Camalo). We have come full circle, with fascinating stops along the way, bearing the name of Llanito, Genoese, Spanish, Arabic and Haketia!
I searched in vain for words like chicha, chorbo, jindama (though in TVS it appears as hindama), chorizo (in the sense of dropout, social misfit), curro, chorbo and fetén. These words are used by local writers like Dale Buttigieg, Manuel Enriles, Gabriel Moreno, and Mark Sanchez. Someone should have trawled through their work and noted these examples of current Llanito.
This review may give the impression of conveying a negative appraisal of The Llanito Dictionaries. That would be a misreading of my intention. I fully acknowledge the hard work and dedication which have gone into compiling the individual dictionaries and Rebecca’s splendid amalgamation. But, as JK so astutely points out in his absorbing book, Gibraltar’s language is a ‘terra incognita’ which requires careful study and scholarly treatment. It seems we have rushed in where angels fear to tread!
Charles Durante is a retired English teacher who regularly writes about language and literature in the local press.
