Wordy Wednesday: Jubilación.

So I´ve decided to try to create a little feature post that I hope to write every second week or so. It´s called Wordy Wednesday, from which you will have undoubtedly deduced that I will post these on Wednesdays and that the posts will deal with words. I plan on writing some brief tales about vocabulary and grammar, the differences between English and Spanish, and my experiences learning Spanish in Spain.

This week my word of choice is jubilación.

English and Spanish share roots to more vocabulary than you might think. Often when a word in English ends in the suffix `-ion´ there will be a similar word in Spanish with the suffix `ción´. For example, nation/nación, ambition/ambición, creation/creación and so on.

So, looking at the word jubilación you wouldn´t be silly to assume that the English translation was jubilation. Dear reader, welcome to the language student´s world of false friends/falsos amigos!

Jubilación means retirement.

I find this highly amusing as it leads me to conclude that perhaps this isn´t a case of false friends after all… If a Spanish-speaker were to incorrectly assume that the English word for retirement was jubilation, would they really be wrong?

TTFN.

PS: If you do want to say jubilation in Spanish, the word is júbilo.