The Spanish personal pronouns tú and vos

Many modern American Spanish language varieties use the personal pronoun vos instead of tú when referring to the grammatical second person. The pronoun Vos is the predominant, if not the only form used by an enormous amount of Spanish speakers in many countries. This usage is especially evident in ordinary day to day oral language exchange.

The Spanish verb forms experience changes in their structures: Vos users say, for example, vos tenés or vos sabés instead of tú tienes or tú sabes.

The pronoun vos is used in countries such as Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Uruguay and all the Central American countries with the exception of Panama. Speakers in some countries make a selective use of this pronoun. In Chile and Colombia for example, tú is also used. On the other hand, vos is used by everyone in Argentina or Uruguay in daily speech.

The historical reasons that gave origin to this language phenomenon are far too complex and convoluted to be examined in detail in a short post like this. However, I must add that it’s very important for all users of any Spanish language variety, to have a clear understanding of the basic nature of it.

Firstly, the pronoun vos is as legitimate as tú since it’s used by a vast amount of speakers in many countries of the new world.

In the second place, contrary to the official position of Spanish language academies, the pronoun vos should be taught alongside tú as synonym structure for the second person singular in all modern Spanish grammar texts. Doing this would not only contribute to enrich the Spanish grammar as taught in the school system, but it would - more importantly - recognize a language usage that some people pretend that it doesn’t exist.

For students of Spanish as a second language it’s extremely important to know about this language aspect, especially in circumstances that require them to be in Spanish speaking regions or countries where vos is used.

The aspiration or loss of /s/ syllable final in spoken Spanish

The aspiration or loss of the /s/ sound in a final position of a word is a natural phonological feature found in many varieties of Iberian and American Spanish.

This language phenomenon is marked by an aspiration or dropping of the /s/ when speakers articulate structures like los niños, las casas or las tiendas grandes. An approximate phonological transcription for these structures may be: loh niñoh, lah casah and lah tiendah grandeh.

I’ve heard quite often people commenting about this issue in a negative way. Some of them think that some native Spanish speakers aspirate the /s/ due to pure linguistic laziness and that such speakers must make an effort to correct their speech. Whenever I can I point out to anyone making this type of comments, that this phonological phenomenon - like all other aspects of language - is neither wrong nor right. That speakers resorting to this kind of linguistic structures are just making use of language in a way suitable for them.

At the end of the day what really matters for speakers of a language quite independently from the conventional features such as standard pronunciation patterns, is that the linguistic structures being used in any given situation must be socially accepted in the setting where they’re using such structures.

Thus it doesn’t really matter whether some Spanish speakers say lah casah instead of las casas as long as they are mutually intelligible.

In the language classroom, however, students must be taught to pronounce the standard /s/ whenever necessary in their spoken Spanish.

Letter ñ presence in Spanish language domain names

Last year I wrote a post about letter ñ presence in Spanish language domain names on the internet. I was at elcastellano.org/noticias website today and I read an article about this same topic, which I think adds to what I’ve already written.

The article in Spanish at elcastellano.org/noticias - by Luis Viviant - reports that Argentina is trying to follow the example set by Chile, Spain and Mexico as major Spanish speaking countries that have already incorporated the letter ñ into their domain names.

I found out in the article, that Chile was the first Spanish speaking country that introduced this letter in 2005 in their domain names. I clarify this here as when I wrote the post that I’m referring to above, I thought it was Spain the first country that did so.

In his article Luis Viviant writes that the initiative for the incorporation of letter ñ into the Argentinean domain names was taken by a private news company (Grupo Clarin). This is a great initiative as it motivates the public to participate on issues that affect their daily language usage.

I said in my first post on this topic, that letter ñ is an integral part of the Spanish language. I consider extremely important that all domain names written in Spanish must use the proper script and graphic symbols of this language. It’s very encouraging to see media organizations of the Spanish speaking countries trying to correct inappropriate language usage.

There is no valid reason for not incorporating the letter ñ and all the other Spanish graphic symbols into all the domain names written in the Castilian language in all the other Spanish speaking countries that still use inappropriate spelling system.

Ladino: A Judeo Spanish-Iberian language preserved for more than five centuries

I’ve always been aware of the existence of Ladino or also known as Judeo Spanish, but it was only today that I managed to have a first contact not only with its written but also its spoken forms in a simultaneous way. And it couldn’t have been in a more magnificent fashion than through music…and a beautiful voice.

Today I bought two compact disks by Yasmin Levy. One is called Romance and Yasmin and the other Mano Suave. The music and the lyrics are a heavenly affair, as its instrumentation and Yasmin’s voice are soothing and bewitching.

On the other hand, every song is for me an exploration of how late fifteen century Castilian Spanish may have sounded in the streets of Toledo, Granada or Seville. It’s like going back in time!

A quick glance at the song’s written lyrics has allowed me to notice that from the etymological point of view the language (I’m talking about some simple language structures found here) seems pretty much the same as any modern Spanish variety. I could be walking in San Salvador, Madrid or Lima and if I met a person speaking to me in Ladino there would only be some little trouble in communicating in a casual ordinary manner if I had to talk to them, or them talking to me.

This is of course my first impressions. I’d have to do a proper study of all the structural aspects of this language in order to have a clearer idea of its intrinsic nature.

In the meantime I searched on the internet and I found at the website orbitlat.com some essential reading about basic features on the history and nature of Judeo Spanish. A very interesting point here is that Ladino - as far as I know - is the only language derived from Spanish, which has also been written in a script different to the Latin alphabet.

The language is also known by many other names and has several dialects spoken in many countries. These dialects also have a great influence from Portuguese regarding words and grammatical structures according to orbilat.com, above.

Ladino is a Spanish-Iberian language that deserves to be preserved, taught and learned by any person interested in language studies, but more so, by all native Spanish and Portuguese speaking people as it can teach us quite a few interesting aspects in relation to the nature of Spanish and Portuguese as the two major languages originated from the Iberian Peninsula.

Judeo Spanish has a very complex and varied history. That fact seems to be reflected in the grammatical, lexical and phonological features of the language that I have perused today in a very brief manner.

I intend to study and learn more about this charming Spanish-Iberian language variety.

PS: I may also be walking in Sao Paulo or Lisbon and speak Portuguese with a Ladino speaker without much problem in our mutual understanding.

Read excellent posts & comments on the blog Hablas español from the BBC

The BBC website has an excellent page named Los blogs de BBC Mundo. Obviously all the blogs are written in Spanish, although some commentaries are sometimes written in English.

There are several blogs dealing with the topic of languages. The more interesting blog for me is Hablas español, because of its focus on issues about the Spanish language, which is of course the subject of my blog here. However, Hablas español is mainly focussed on issues related to Spanish speakers living in the United States.

The blog Hablas español is a first class resource to get to know about the views of Spanish speaking people living in the US on issues connected to their language and culture. It’s also an excellent site for students learning Spanish to practice their reading skills with the aid of real language usage by native Spanish speakers.

As commentaries are not corrected from the grammatical point of view by the moderators of the blog, students need to be aware that there may be spelling and grammatical errors in the comments.

The blog´s posts are written in standard Spanish by BBC staff.

I’m adding the BBC with its Hablas español blog to my Blogroll here.

Some thoughts about the origins and meanings of the term bizarro

Finding out about the origin and meanings of words is one of the areas of language study that I enjoy most, mainly because every time I analyze a particular term, I achieve a better knowledge about its hidden aspects. This also provides me with a better understanding of the nature of language in general. A friend of mine asked me last week if I could provide him with some information about the etymology and meanings of the Spanish term bizarro compared with its English counterpart bizarre.

According to the Macquarie Dictionary, the word bizarre is an adjective used in English with the meanings of
singular in appearance, style or general character; whimsically strange; odd.
It says that the term comes from the Spanish bizarro (meaning brave) and that this Castilian word in turn comes from the Basque bizar (meaning beard).

On the other hand, the Pequeño Larousse Ilustrado dictionary, says that the Spanish adjective bizarro comes from the Italian bizzarro (meaning singular). It’s mainly used in Spanish with the meanings of brave, chivalrous, generous, and splendid. This source warns that is inappropriate to use this term in Spanish with the meanings of extravagant, fantastic or capricious.

An online search for the word bizarro at The Royal Spanish Language Academy website gave a similar definition to the one found above. It still says that the word originated from the Italian bizzarro, but with the meaning of irascible.

How the word bizarre came to adopt its meanings in English is a mystery to me. From the examination here so far it seems that English adopted the Spanish word structure and the Italian meaning (i.e. singular). However, it seems very curious to me that the word bizarro is defined in the Spanish dictionary as coming from Italian whereas the English one attributes it to Basque.

If the terms bizarro and bizarre come from Basque, the most logical meaning for both Spanish and English words, would simply be barba (Spanish for beard) and beard, respectively, and they would only be used as nouns. How Italian came to use bizzarro, is also open to investigation.

Regarding the words’ meanings in Spanish, it’s quite difficult to ascertain wether they are based on the Basque or Italian terms.

It may be that the Italian usage of this word with the meaning of singular may have influenced the way the Spanish and English terms are used.

PS. I searched for the word bizarro on the internet and found that there is also a fictional character named Bizarro!

The pronoun vosotros and its verbal structures deserved to be used by all native Spanish speakers

Two days ago I wrote a post in Spanish about the personal pronoun vosotros and the verb structures involved with its usage in the Spanish language.

The pronoun vosotros and the verb structures connected with it are used in the Castilian varieties of Spain only. However, all native Spanish speakers learn to use all these language aspects during their formal education process provided by the education systems in all the Spanish speaking countries.

I won’t deal in a short post like this with the causes that gave origin to the lack of usage of vosotros and its verbal structures by most native Spanish speakers.

The subject pronouns that are normally listed for the conjugation of the Spanish verbs are: yo, tú, él/ella/usted, nosotros/nosotras, vosotros/vosotras and ellos/ellas/ustedes.

There are six conjugation forms which attach to each of these subject pronouns. To illustrate, the conjugations for the verb amar (to love) in present indicative are: amo, amas, ama, amamos, amáis, aman. The structure amáis corresponds to vosotros/vosotras - the second person plural subject pronoun (used in informal settings). And this is the form that is not used by native Spanish speakers except those from Spain. To make up for this, the vast majority of speakers use ustedes - the third person plural subject pronoun (used in formal settings by all native Spanish speakers). Thus for the verb in reference here, the greatest bulk of native users employ the form aman for both second and third person plural.

The pronoun vosotros and its verb structures are well worth to consider for bringing back into usage by native Spanish speakers that don’t use them in all the modern Spanish language varieties outside Spain. Here are three sensible reasons:

1. The wealth of a language is mainly judged by the amount of language resources available to it. The pronoun vosotros and its verb structures are integral part of the Spanish language. They contribute to enrich the written as well as the spoken structures of this language.

2. Using these structures gives more precision and clarity to language usage. Why using the form for the third person plural to mean the second person? The pronoun vosotros and its verb structures already exist in the language and from a purely linguistic point of view there’s no reason why they shouldn’t be used by all native speakers.

3. From my personal perspective, I think that verbal forms involved with the pronoun vosotros, give Spanish a refined and charming phonological effect. Let’s consider, for example, the following verses by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz…Hombres necios que acusáis a la mujer sin razón, sin saber que sois la ocasión de lo mismo que culpáis.

It’s important to mention here, that from the cultural point of view, it may be very hard - although not impossible - to reintroduce the usage of the structures examined in this post in the daily spoken and written language of native Spanish speakers who haven’t used them for centuries, namely the users of Spanish in the New World.

Any effort to make a successful reintroduction of a generalized usage of these structures by native Spanish speakers that don’t currently use them, can only be achieved in the long term by conscious effort by speakers acting as individuals and through educational and cultural intervention.

The pronoun vosotros and verb structures used with it, are languishing and in peril of being relegated forever as language anachronism in the majority of Spanish language varieties. I’m of the firm opinion that these structures are a great linguistic resource and therefore they deserved to be saved, by being used both orally and in their written form by all native Spanish speakers…I have already started to do so: ¿Y vosotros qué pensáis?

The lexical wealth of the Spanish language

In my long experience of teaching Spanish, I have witnessed the amazed reaction of students learning this language whenever the issue of synonyms and the abundant number of idiomatic expressions with which Spanish is endowed arises. I’d like deal in this post with the richness of the lexical or vocabulary aspect of Spanish.

The Castilian language possesses a very rich array of lexical terms particularly in relation to nouns and verb forms. I always like to mention in my Spanish classes, for example how the noun pig, can be said in Spanish using a large variety of synonyms. Thus the words cerdo, puerco, marrano, cochino, tunco, cuche, chancho, are some of the words used to name a pig in Spanish.

In the verbal area, the language of Cervantes also possesses a very ample variety of terms from which to choose. There are also in this category abundant quantities of synonyms.

This is a very important feature of Spanish as it contributes to make language usage interesting, entertaining and varied.

The vast amount of synonyms has given Spanish a literature characterized by an elegant and florid language usage immortalized in gold script by giants of Castilian language letters such as Miguel de Cervantes, Gabriel García Márquez, Federico García Lorca, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Calderón de la Barca, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Teresa de Ávila, Rómulo Gallegos, San Juan de la Cruz (Saint John of the Cross), Rubén Darío, Claribel Alegría, Jorge Luís Borges, Rosario Ferré, Nicolás Guillén, Julio Cortázar…

From the practical point of view, the availability of a large amount of synonyms may seem an insurmountable obstacle for the students of Spanish, due to the extra amount of words that they need to learn. However, after the initial learning stages and a constant exposure to written and spoken Spanish and especially when the students are becoming more fluent in the language, they realize that this feature, rather than a hindrance, is a great contributor to the goal of achieving full language competence in Spanish.

A new Pan Hispanic Spanish Grammar to be launched by language academies

The website elcastellano.org reports that 22 Spanish language academies (from the Spanish speaking world) are meeting in Segovia, Spain, in a conference to coordinate their work preparing for a new grammar of the Spanish language.

The website adds that the planned grammatical work will be the first since 1931.

Standard Spanish is a language that has maintained its uniformity due to the presence of language academies, which take as their role to regulate standard language usage.

Historically, that regulatory role has been performed by the Real Academia de la Lengua (The Royal Spanish Language Academy). In recent times there has been a movement - in all the Spanish speaking countries (or countries with Spanish language academies) - to make that regulatory role universal. This implies the active participation of all the academies.

Spanish is the forth most important language of the world; it possesses a vast language corpus with a high degree of vernacular linguistic variation spread in the large Spanish speaking population of the New World.

Most modern Spanish speakers live in the American continent; because of this fact, the academies from that part of the world, need to make sure that the language usage in their particular country is thoroughly studied and included in any Pan Hispanic Spanish grammar.

A new and universal grammatical guide for the Spanish language will be of great utility for maintaining the unity of Standard Spanish. However, a more important role for the New World Spanish academies would be to accelerate the inclusion of all vernacular lexical terms of any origin which are still not incorporated into the academies’ dictionaries. Carrying out this task is highly relevant if we consider that the language academies, apart from regulating the unity of standard Spanish, must also ensure that the linguistic wealth of the Spanish language is preserved for the future.

All the Spanish varieties from the New World are immensely rich in vernacular language structures which haven’t yet been officially incorporated by the language academies. These vernacular lexical terms which include mainly nouns - an enormous amount of them - as well as verbal and adjectival forms, can be collected in dictionaries and thus be safely preserved.

The indelible presence of the Nahuatl language in modern Spanish

Nahuatl is a language from Mexico, belonging to the Uto-Aztecan group of languages. It was the language of the Aztecs, as well as of the Pipil, an ancient Mexican people that settled in the western area of what is now El Salvador. Nahuatl has made an indelible mark into modern Spanish, especially to the varieties of this language as spoken in Mesoamerica.

Nahuatl is still spoken by more than two and a half million people and used as a cultural vehicle, particularly in Mexico.

Reading from the archives of elcastellano.org/noticias I found a very interesting article about the join publication of a Diccionario del náhuatl en el español de México (Dictionary of Nahuatl terms in Mexican Spanish) by the Government of the Federal District of Mexico and the UNAM (The Autonomic National University of Mexico).

The article at the site referred to here is by Juan Solis from El Universal. It reports that the dictionary incorporates more than 2000 Nahuatl lexical and toponymic terms. It adds that according to the UNAM academic Carlos Montemayor, the coordinator in charge of the dictionary’s publication, the new lexical book also includes Nahuatl names and botanical terms.

This Dictionary of Nahuatl terms in Mexican Spanish is a great achievement towards registering, studying, maintaining and preserving for future generations the linguistic wealth that the ancient Native American tongues such as Nahuatl have given to the Spanish language.

PS. To learn more about the nature of Nahuatl, visit http://www.omniglot.com/writing/nahuatl.htm