I have a friend with whom I tend to discuss linguistics and translations. This friend, Glass, speaks Spanish as a second language, non-natively, which means that language comes up a lot.
I also sometimes talk to them about Worm, which they haven’t read (this makes me feel a lot safer about discussing it outside the blog than I usually do).
So when I encountered an Anglo-Spanish pidgin in Worm, of course I had to talk to them about it!
Krixwell:
So here's a thing you might appreciate
The last chapter of Worm I read included some lines in an Anglo-Spanish pidgin
Glass:
Huh
What'd it sound like?
Krixwell:
-----
“To gustaria livir?” She asked, in the local’s anglo-spanish pidgin. Do you want to live?
His eyes widened as he seemed to realize she was there. “Eres an gwarra engel?”
“No,” she replied. She brushed his hair out of his face with one hand. “No an engel.” Not an angel.
“Livir,” he breathed the word before slumping over.
-----
Glass:
"Livir"
That's... weird to hear
It's an English word with a Spanish sort of conjugation
Krixwell:
And later:
------
“Eres okay,” she said, in his language. “Eres livo.”
It’s okay. You’re alive. She forced herself to smile as reassuringly as she could. ------
Glass:
Now that I think about it that's just the actual word for live/alive (vivir/vivo) but with an L
Glass:
If "live" were directly used in Spanish as a loanword it would probably be "livear"
“Eres an gwarra engel?”
Something like "are you a war angel?"
Krixwell:
I interpreted it as "are you a guardian angel", but you'd know better than me and "war angel" makes more sense with the setting of the specific scene
Glass:
In Spanish I believe it would be "¿Eres un ángel de guerra?"
The U in "guerra" doesn't get pronounced, but I guess that's where the pidgin part comes in
Krixwell:
There and in the construction of the compound using the English format
Glass:
Oh, and in Spanish "eres" means "you're" so I'm surprised "eres okay" didn't get translated as "you're okay"
And in fact I'm surprised it's not "estás okay" or whatever the pidgin variant of "estás" would be
The actual way to say "you're okay" would be "estás bien" which uses another word for "you're"
Krixwell:
I did translate it as "you're" before the POV character gave her translation.
Honestly, "you're" makes a little more sense.
Glass:
I wonder if this is an actual pidgin
Krixwell:
It would be like Wildbow to use an actual one
Glass:
The words "an" and "engel" are intriguingly ambiguous about which language they come from
"an" could be from English "a"/"an" or Spanish "un"/"una"/"unos"/"unas"
Krixwell:
I like how it ends up getting spelled like in Norwegian.
The latter, I mean
Glass:
"Engel" could be from English "angel" or Spanish "ángel"
Would probably be clearer if I heard how it was pronounced, though
Spanish one is very roughly pronounced like "AHN-hell"
(I need to learn IPA one of these days.)