Conviasa, the state airline created in 2004 to replace Viasa (the former flag carrier) is having a really bad week.
The European Union just banned it from flying to Europe and the Caribbean. The reason? Not complying with “operational procedures.” The decision is not permanent, but getting blacklisted is not conducive to building a solid brand.
Right before this happened, the passengers of a Maiquetia-Madrid flight had to wait 30 hours in the region’s worst airport because of a “technical failure.” They finally left, but not without making a stink about their ordeal. Another flight to Buenos Aires was delayed for the same reason. Just when things couldn’t get worse, the airline workers decided to hold a little protest of their own. The reason – their difficult situation, as the number of available planes is just 2 or 3 for all their operations.
Conviasa took three years to set up shop after it was announced in 2001. The situation is critical after the tragic accident of Flight 2350 in 2010, which crashed near Ciudad Guayana. After the accident, all ATR 42 planes were grounded, and several domestic and foreign destinations were eliminated.
Lest you think this is caused by who its shareholder is, Conviasa’s case is not isolated. Venezuelan civil aviation is on yellow alert, according to experts. Days ago, an Aserca plane had to make an emergency landing. The aging fleet and lack of spare parts has made the experience of flying into an ordeal.
…had “her” terrible bad week? ;-)
Yes! Conviasa is a she.
la avión?
La empresa. La organización.
Conviasa is not a plane.
you are right. temporary blind spot.
Si es una linea aerea
Si, la aerolínea y el aerolíneo tuvieron una mala semana y un mal semano.
Only in Spanish.
Or rather, “in Spanish, not English”, before the armchair linguists swoop down.
I think the title should be ‘Conviasa and its terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week’.
Companies are not people,
Legally they are persons, but that’s a whole new debate.
Oh please, you people need to read some children’s literature and lighten up. The title is an obvious twist on the classic book “Alexander and his terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.” It doesn’t work the same way with “its.”
Obviously it wasn’t so obvious.
I never read that book. I feel bad now.
That’s where it came from? Good to know.
Isn’t the name of the book Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day?
When I read the title of this Conviasa post, I immediately thought of the Alexander book.
CACR
You’re right. Now I feel embarrassed, I got it wrong. Anyway, nothing to see here people, move along… :)
Try telling Mitt Romney that :p
While Conviasa’s problems may not be caused by its (her – though she’s no Alexander) shareholder, they certainly are exacerbated by that shareholder – as are the problems of Aserca (though not in a shareholder role).
Thank you AIO, One who got it.
Are there any linguistics experts out there who can explain exactly what purpose it serves in Spanish to assign gender to nouns without inherent gender? And how did this even evolve?
You native Romance language speakers cannot have any idea of how tedious this is to the rest of us, even if we have learned to deal with it. All for the lack of an “it”!
Your great-30-times father would “se sunne” for “the sun”, and he would point at it with his hammer and grunt “heo is hat” as if it were a woman, “she is hot”, but he would say “se mann” for “the man” (not “se mann”). His great-greatgrandchildren changed that to “the sun” and “the man”. Several causes. Languages are based on population dynamics. There are trends. There are traditions – also kept by a stronger written past (for us, Latin).
English took the way of isolating languages. This means you developed an increasingly simpler morphological system – less endings – but also less freedom for word order.
If you keep distinctions it is easier to switch order or create references that are not continuous: “atascada estaba la puerta cuando llegaron”.
Once you went that way, there was less and less sense to keep the whole system, even for items that have “gender”, like men and women. Why did your ancestors say “se sunne” at all, like so many other people? Perhaps because they had this story about the sun, saw it as a female item…like other Germanic tribes…or perhaps it was because the word had a similar pattern to one that also used “se”. In any case, most languages with full use of gender (for “the man”, “the woman”) also keep gender for things.
Hebrew and Arabic are in between. They have the same article for book or door
(ha) but book is masculine and door is feminine and so they need to keep verb endings and adjectives…but this also allows to express references apart from the referred without much confusion.
In languages like Spanish or Russian you can skip pronouns.
Chinese is more isolating than English. It is even simpler when it comes to morphology but word order is very fixed.
So: it is roughly speaking a complex matter of choosing rich morphology or more fixed word order PLUS traditions.
Oh geez…
Gustavo, I can assure you I didn’t intended to drag the attention of the Conviasa posting to here…I am sorry!!
Can we just agree that we all speak some sort of spanglish and call it a day???
LOL!!
There you go: “I didn’t INTEND…” is what I was supposed to write.
To be honest, the headline wasn’t my choice.
The difference between my proposal and the final product is pretty small.
It was my choice, btw. And I love it.
BTW, I’m OK with it.
Some African languages have 10 genders
one for each category of object: object for hunting (pointy), receptacle (hollow), flat object etc. I forget, but some classifications are based on function, some on shape, some on a mixture of both.
Maybe the classifiers serve as a mnemonic aid?
Indoeuropean had three genders, corresponding to basically femenine round hollow vs masculine pointy edgy vs neuter other but modern descendants have almost gotten rid of the neuter
On African aspect distinctions for nouns: Do you consider that gender?
By the way: there are lots of Indoeuropean languages where the neuter is fine, thank-you: look at Slavic languages, look at most Germanic languages.
By the way, on that about hollowness and gender (!): it doesn’t make a sense. Солнце (neuter) versus Sonne (femenin) but звезда (femenine) versus Stern (masculine)?
Most American languages lack the distinction.
Roy, there is a very old but well written book by your countryman Edward Sapir. It’s online now and he writes a bit on some hypothesis on the issue. It’s a bit old-fashioned, but still there are important items there.
OK, too much OT. Bye.
Roy, no need to be a linguistics expert to note that, technically, gender is not being assigned…
–
gender
“See also natural gender a set of two or more grammatical categories into which the nouns of certain languages are divided, sometimes but not necessarily corresponding to the sex of the referent when animate” [ http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/gender?s=t ]
What I meant was that “La” before “mano” does not make a hand a female, only of a female category, which is “sometimes but not necessarily corresponding to the sex”.
–
You native Romance language speakers cannot have any idea of how tedious this is to the rest of us, even if we have learned to deal with it. All for the lack of an “it”!
English grammar is simpler than Spanish grammar. If you want to be overwhelmed, try learning German grammar, and feel thankful our Anglo Saxon ancestors simplified it.
English spelling is more difficult than Spanish spelling.
Every language has its own idiosyncrasies.
At least when English speakers learn Spanish, they can find a lot of cognates, as about half the words in English have a French root.
Try leaning Chinese. Not that I have, mind you.
Boludo Tejano,
Yeah, I feel for Spanish speakers trying to write in English. Plus, the pronunciation is MUCH harder: More vowel sounds, compound consonants, and blended consonants…
I guess the gender aspect of Spanish is just one of my pet peeves.
BTW: Those cognates can get you in trouble. A long time ago, when I was first learning the language, I was trying to express that I was embarrassed about something. What I said was “Estoy embarazado.” As you might well imagine, that earned me some odd looks.
I never had a occasion to try Chinese, but I used to speak a little bit of Thai, which is simpler than Chinese, because it only has five tones instead of seven. The grammar is simple, but you have to have or develop a good ear to hear the variations in tones.
No more from me on this subject!
Esto es un problema que lleva tiempo, por falta de asignación de divisas no han podido comprar repuestos. Recuerdo en octubre del año pasado que a un avión se le aflojaron las turbinas a punto de despegar (aunque creo q era de aeropostal), ese mismo mes tuve la oportunidad de hablar con el ex presidente del aeroclub La Carlota, y me dijo que el mes de octubre del año pasado Venezuela se llevó el récord histórico de más “in flight shutdowns”, es decir que tuvieron fallas en los motores una vez emprendido el vuelo. Sólo estos ñángaras le podían quitar el récord a los de la URSS.
Es increible que me sienta mas seguro en el medio del Atlantico con turbulencias que aqui en un vuelo de Barquisimeto a Maiquetia. Los 35 minutos mas largos y angustiantes que he tenido en mucho tiempo.
The engineers of the old USSR understood that they dealt with poor quality control in manufacturing and poor maintenance. As a result, many of their designs included excessive safety factors and appear grossly overbuilt by Western standards. Unfortunately, planes have weight limitations, and they can’t just “pull over” when something goes wrong. Flying on the old Aeroflot planes was downright terrifying. However, thousands of the USSR’s ubiquitous trucks “Kamas” (actually Russian for “truck”) are still running and working thirty and forty years after their manufacture.
The message that the government of venezuela overwhelmingly is giving to tourists is: what the f- are you doing here? buy this overpriced painted stick figure and this t-shirt, and then get the f- out of here before we arrest you for taking photographs.
Chavez has killed tourism(while many other places are setting records for
number of tourists visiting their country..)
It’s ironic that both Conviasa and Viasa share the same outset: the whim of a president.
Conviasa, built on top of the remains of Avensa, has issues which are just a symptom. Most of us know the entire Venezuelan civil aviation industry has been in marked decline for almost 30 years. Our airlines do not have enough purchasing power to buy a single aircraft; dry leases have become a luxury increasingly difficult to afford. On top of that, the Chavez government does not think of bettering aviation rules —how otherwise could Merida airport be closed?— and makes it impossible to get parts to fix our flying wreck.
I’m totally for creating opportunities for Venezuelan initiative, but, given the circumstances, and running the risk of bashing, I wish Lan bought any of our air carriers next year to see some improvement soon.
Completely agree. Re-open the commercial aviation sector to foreign investment — don’t re-do Iberia, PLEASE — and let the COPAs or LANs of the continent take over, shake it up, and see what happens.
El vuelo fantasma es muy problematico para los gringos. La reciente visita del General Jack Dempsey a la frontera con Venezuela y su discurso de WMD no son coincidencias.