I Don't Know What It Means, But I Can Spell It

Last Sunday, at the 5th birthday party for Nestor and Marcela's son Mati, I botched the pronunciation of the birthday co-festee, Antonella, by calling her An-to-neyjsh-a (the Argentinian pronunciation) and not An-to-nel-a (the Italian one). The night before, I managed not to flub "fusilli," which is pronounced foo-see-lee, not foo-see-jshi (as one would expect by Argy rules). Both of these led to what is now a common occurance: we now spend large fractions of our day discussing language with other people, whether it be by receiving the mildy condescending, "Noooo, your Spanish is very good," or, on a more etymological level, learning why so many words that end in the usually-feminine a--like el problema or el sistema--are masculine (because of their Greek origins, we're told).

A recurring theme that comes up in such discussions with Argentines who wish to, or have, learned some English, is that English is simple in form (I walk, you walk, he walks, they walk--not too tough) but almost impossible to pronounce because of its lack of any hard and fast rules (explain beer, bear and ear). Spanish, on the other hand, has a bazillian (trust me, I counted) verb forms, while its pronunciation is incrdibly simple and rule bound: save for a few words of Italian origin (which is for immigration reasons more of a problem in Argentina than other Spanish-speaking countries), if you know the rules, you can correctly pronounce and spell any Spanish word even if you've got no clue what it means.

This in itself is interesting to note, but it made me think about a cultural artifact of the English-speaking world: the spelling bee. Without the irrational rules of a mutt language, is there any reason to put quivering ten-year-olds on stage and demand that they spell out esoteric anatomical terms? Without spelling mistakes, on what failures do the expression-snobbish dub someone "poorly educated"" (It seems to be failure to use the subjunctive.) And could the 2002 documentary Spellbound have even been made, much less nominated for an Oscar, in a Spanish-speaking country?

The answer to that question is apparently 'no.' Asking our Spanish teacher whether spelling bees existed produced a shake of the head and the dictum that, "If you can pronounce it, you can spell it." A search for the movie in Spanish (it's called Al pie de la letra, or At the Foot of the Letter) turned up a few reviews but not much more. But the modern journalist's crutch seemed to prove the lack of a weird subculture of competitive orthography (thank god): a Google search for two Spanish traslations of spelling bee--certamen de ortografía and concurso de deletreo--brought up 35 and 151 pages respectively, while spelling bee itself pulled up a whopping 611,000 hits.