Mis Libros

Day 151: Years ago when I first started studying Spanish, I purchased as many "kid level" natural history volumes as I could find at Powell's Books in Portland Oregon. I was surprised at the depth of many of them, the scientific vocabulary certainly beyond anything American children of equivalent age would be reading in English. When I bogged down in grammar and gave up hope of becoming fluent, I shelved them, seldom taking any one of them out to read. I've picked them up again now, and although I've now surpassed the reading level for many of them, the two encyclopedias continue to entertain me.

While discussing this on Facebook last night, I was grumbling that DuoLingo's constant drill of easy sentences like "The elephant is grey" and "My daughter eats an apple" were getting rather old, considering that I've advanced well beyond that in the course. I posted a paragraph from the "Enciclopedia Mega Naturaleza y Ecología" you see at bottom center. It read, "Más de 50 especies de grandes mamiferos viven en la sabana. Casi todos son herbívoros: antílopes, gacelas, jirafas, elefantes y búfalos, constituyen las presas de los carnívoros, como los felinos, y de los necrófagos, que se alimentan de cadáveres (hienas, buitres)." I managed to read all of that without resorting to the dictionary, although I rather paused a bit over "necrófagos" until my head sorted it out from Latin.

This morning, I had a reply from Kevin which absolutely cracked me up. FB followers will already have read the exchange, but I post it here for your amusement: "First of all, I'm a bit peeved at Facebook for giving me the 'Automatically Translated' version first, with a tiny, gray 'original version' link at the bottom, instead of showing it to me the way the original author wrote it. So I read your note first in English, and did a double-take when you said (or seemed to say) '...the prey of the carnivores, like cats, and ghouls, which feed on corpses...' Ghouls? On the savanna? And then you said 'I rather paused a bit over 'Ghouls' until my head sorted it out from Latin.' Ghouls? Latin? THEN I saw the 'original version' link, read it in Spanish, and saw the word in question: 'necrófagos,' which, like you, I readily disassembled into 'corpse-eaters.' Yes, almost every machine-translator I checked reduces this to 'ghouls,' except Oxford's Spanish dictionary, bless them, which offers up the scientific term that matches the context: necrophagous. Yes, 99.9% of the time in general parlance 'necrófagos' will mean ghouls, in the context of Halloween or Hollywood. Unless you're a scientist, like us, in which case those auto-translators (ahem, Facebook) will inspire una ceja arqueada."