De or del

By Richard Ruffin

No one can agree. I am talking about del and de. Or de and del. Some say Valle del Elqui, others say Valle de Elqui.

Everyone is an expert, and everyone has their own opinion. The local bus line has Valle de Elqui written on the side. And they are 100 percent Chilean.

I asked Mari. I overhear her tutoring her daughter Andrea. She should know (after all, she is Venezuelan). She doesn´t. I heard her ask her boyfriend Dali. But first she told me that it must be del because, because……I cannot remember why. Her boyfriend told her that that the correct word is de. Valle de Elqui.

But this piqued her curiosity. She is interested in this subject. So, she asked Robert, the owner of this hostel in which I am staying. He is from Lebanon, via the U.S., but he speaks Spanish well. Well enough that he was an interpreter in the Iraq War, working for the U.S. government. His job was to interpret Arabic, and they also asked him to interpret Kurdish. For native English speakers, Spanish is a much easier language than either Arabic or Kurdish. For one thing, Spanish is written and read from left to right. Not the case with Arabic.

But Robert is not a native English speaker, although he sounds a lot better than most of the people out there. He is Lebanese. Well, American Lebanese. Are you confused now? I thought you would be.

Anyhow, the woman who works here, Mari, had this to say: “I asked Robert, my boss, about this and he told me that the majority of people in Vicuna do not have any idea if it is de or del.” But they care. They care enough to argue for about 15 minutes on such a topic. And everybody has an opinion.

All hell broke loose while these people argued, and they did not come to any conclusion after all. So much for that. It took place at the museum next door. Gabriela Mistral Museum or Museo de Gabriela Mistral. (See, it is de Gabriela Mistral.) I had never heard of Gabriela Mistral until I came to Chile, but she was the first person to win the Nobel Prize for literature in Latin America. Here she is a god.

So, the saga continues. Is it de or del? Or del and de? How the simple possessive meaning “of” in English could cause so much trouble is beyond me. Only God knows.

I find a lot of typos and misspelled words here in Chile, in all of South America, actually, but I find a lot of misspellings on the postings of Yahoo! and YouTube. And a lot of those people are Americans. North Americans.

You know what? We all have to go back to school again, and learn how to read and write.

The writer (rick.ruffin@gmail.com) writes from Chile.