Personally, I've always been a little suspicious of social scientists who don't watch sports. If anthropology is about human beings, how can we ignore something as universally popular as sport just because some of us were stuffed into our lockers one too many times by the jocks?
Take baseball, for example. The spread of this sometimes mystifying game throughout the Western Hemisphere, not to mention East Asia, has changed the language, economy and landscape wherever it is played. Additionally, whenever speakers of different languages get together in a clubhouse or bullpen, words can travel from one tongue to another faster than a minor league team on the road. These words are called loanwords, although it's not like anyone expects to get them back when we're done with them.
In this first part of the Linguistics of Baseball, we'll illustrate the various ways that loanwords behave as they move from language to language, as well as looking at other options for giving names to new games, plays and players. We'll explore the terminology of that quintessential Americano sport, “béisbol,” and the beers won't even cost you $9!
A quick read of the sports page in my local, Spanish language newspaper reveals quite a number of English loanwords in Spanish: “el pitcher,” “las bases” and “el inning.” A closer look, however, will reveal several more. This is because loanwords are almost always changed to fit the spelling and pronunciation of the borrowing language. Hence, “jonrón” (= “homerun”) and “estraíc” (= 'strike'), since, among other things, Spanish can't begin a word with an S-sound.
Somewhat more difficult are loan-translations and calques, two terms which are sometimes considered synonyms and sometimes vehemently kept separate. In a shameless attempt to keep the dreaded Linguistic Internet Trolls away, I will say, definitively, that these may (or may not) be the same thing. So there.
Generally speaking, a calque occurs when a multi-part word is translated, bit by bit, to create a new word. The canonical example is the English word “skyscraper,” which was calqued into Spanish. First, the “sky-” and “-scraper” were separated, then individually translated into “cielo” (sky) and “rasca” (scrape) before being put back together into the brand new Spanish word “rascacielo.”
Loan translations, on the other hand, don't necessarily result in a new word being created, but rather import a new meaning from the source language. The Spanish word for a computer mouse, for example, is the same as the little animal mouse, “el ráton.” The English word “mouse” (as in computer) was not borrowed, but translated literally and given a new meaning.
Things get more complicated when we get to a Spanish word like “carrera” (= “run scored”). Is this a loan translation from the English “run” or did Spanish speakers simply coin the term from the obvious act of running around the bases? Or what about the phrase “hombres en las esquinas” (= “men on the corners”, runners on first and third base)? It is translated part by part (like a calque) but doesn't create a brand new word(like a loan translation). And what should we call a hybrid such as “bases congestionadas” (= “bases loaded”) which is half-borrowed and half-translated!?
Obviously, speakers have many options when borrowing words from another language. As we've seen, the word can be imported with or without tweaking it's sounds or shape (loanwords), a new word or phrase can be created from existing words (calques, loan translations) or a little of both ("bases congestionadas"). Still, this is not the whole story.
Human beings are notoriously disrespectful of boundaries (it's one of the qualities that endears them to me so much). Baseball may be as American as apple pie, but béisbol is as Cuban as black beans and rice, as Colombian as arepas, as Mexican as mole sauce, and on and on and on.... With enough passing generations, a group of human beings can make anything their own.
And so, Spanish speakers inevitably invented their own terminology for their own game. The four-sided shape of a baseball diamond gives rise to “cuandrangulare” (homerun) even though I've never heard an English speaker refer to a four base hit as a “quadrangle.” Alongside “el pitcher,” is the more common term “lanzador” (pitcher), which derives from a Late Latin word meaning to wield a spear. (The same word, “lanceare,” eventually became the English verb “to launch”).
Rather than an “outfield,” a Spanish baseball stadium has a “jardín” (garden) or a “bosque” (woods) beyond the diamond. A critical hit is “golden” (“jit de oro”) rather than “clutch.” And every manager wants to have a durable “caballo de hierro” (= “iron horse”) or two on his team.
What I hope to show by this excursion into the linguistics of baseball is that language communicates and explains every part our human world: sports, philosophy, fashion, sex, architecture, celebrity gossip.... Look at any random slice of life in the right light, and the whole picture of language will appear like a holographic image.
This has been another rambling column brought to you by Schendo's Bad Grammar. Any reproduction or rebroadcast does not need the expressed written consent of Major League Baseball. The primary corpus used was “Rojos logran revancha antes de festejos derechos civiles,” which appeared (via the AP) in the La Jornada Latina Vol 12, Num 20 May 14-20, 2010. Where possible, terminology was double checked with Ralph Insigna's Spanish-English Baseball Dictionary.
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