L. A. Pinel

Archive for February 2008

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

In Culture, Education, Language, Language learning, Spanish, Spanish Language Learning on February 23, 2008 at 9:38 pm

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 Culture, Education, Foreign Language Learning, Language, Language learning, Second Language Learning, Spanish, Spanish Language Learning on February 17, 2008 at 7:21 am

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

In Culture, Education, Language, Language learning, Spanish, Spanish Language Learning on February 1, 2008 at 5:49 am

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.