L. A. Pinel

Archive for the ‘Language learning’ Category

The pronunciation and written patterns of letter g in Spanish

In Education, Foreign Language Learning, Language, Language learning, Learning Process, Phonetics & Phonology, Second Language Learning, Spanish, Spanish Language Learning on June 25, 2009 at 3:49 pm

Getting to know the correct way of pronouncing and using the different written patterns in which letter g is used can be an arduous task for the beginner learner of Spanish.  In my classroom experience I have found that most students can get quite confused about the correct pronunciation of the sounds represented by this letter. Most of their confusion tends to arise from their lack of a detailed knowledge regarding the phonological nature of g.

Letter g possesses three basic sounds: /g/ / γ/ and /x/ – represented here in the International Phonetic Alphabet (API) symbols. It requires a good amount of classroom work for the beginner student to get to correctly use these three sounds.

In general terms, /g/ is used when letter g is found in the written patterns: ga, go, gu, gue, gui, güe, and güi placed in initial positions like in gato, goma, gula, guerra, guiso, güero and güisquil. This sound can also be found in structures where the written patterns we are referring to here are preceded by a consonant sound as in the words ángulo, gorgojo or engalanar.

The sound / γ/ can be found in the written patterns that have been described above -  ga, go, gu, gue, gui, güe, and güi – when they are preceded by a vowel as in the words agarrar, egoísta, cigüeña and gigante.

Letter g is pronounced as /x/ when it is found in the written patterns ge and gi, like in the words gemela, ángel or ingeniero.

The /x/ sound for g as used by Spanish is mainly an unfamiliar sound connected with this letter, as for the majority of speakers of other languages learning Spanish, the phoneme /x/ is applied to other letters. On top of this learners must also come to terms with the sound of letter j in Spanish, which is also/x/.

The triple phonological values of the Spanish g – two of them quite often unknown for beginner learners – and the complexities of the written and sound patterns of the structures, in which they are found, contribute to make the learning of the correct usage of this letter quite difficult, according to my own classroom experience.

Students of the Spanish language at the beginner level need to learn to use these sounds with the help of a professional language teacher or a linguist that can provide them with sufficient oral practice and written exercises of each sound.

Without an early intervention, learners may acquire wrong phonological traits when making use of the sounds of g in their oral language. I have taught many students that even though they may be quite fluent in their spoken Spanish, still do repeatedly improper use of the sounds of this letter.

Getting to master the written patterns of letter g and their accompanying sounds, is without doubt one of the most difficult hurdles that the beginner learner needs to get through in order to be able to become a competent user of spoken and written Spanish.

“Latino America Viva” Daily online News in Australia: Read Interesting Cultural Articles about Spanish Speaking People & Countries, in Spanish

In Culture, Education, Foreign Language Learning, Language learning, Second Language Learning, Spanish, Spanish Language Learning on May 15, 2009 at 6:56 am

I have been meaning to write a post about this Australian based website for quite a while. I don’t know exactly since when this daily news service has been on the net; but I have been getting a weekly email from its publishers which contain links to news websites that include some Australian newspapers and BBC News as well as a community events listing that may be of interest for the Spanish speaking people from Latin America living in Australia.

“Latino America Viva” is a good website to find links for news from Latin America, however, what I find more useful for the discerning reader and from the Spanish language learner perspective is its pages ‘Nuestros Colaboradores’, ‘Nuestros artistas por el mundo’, ‘Opinión¨, and ‘Comunidades latinas en el mundo’.

There are some quality articles about Spanish speaking background people connected with the literary, cultural, social and political areas. One of such articles is ‘Fallece Tránsito Amaguaña: símbolo de la lucha indígena’, by my colleague and friend Silvia Cuevas-Morales, writing from Madrid.

Most articles are written in Spanish, but there are some only available in English.

The website offers Spanish and English versions. This is a good thing for the student of the Spanish language as they can navigate between the two versions with great ease.

From the social perspective it seems to me that it’s very good to have an online site that offers information for the Spanish speaking people in Australia, particularly for those living in Sydney and Melbourne.

How important are the ’small words’ in the learning process of the Spanish Language?

In Education, Foreign Language Learning, Language, Language learning, Learning Process, Second Language Learning, Spanish, Spanish Language Learning on April 5, 2009 at 4:02 am

One of my students asked me yesterday if I could prepare a lesson that could deal with the nature of the ‘small words’ in the study of Spanish grammar. I replied to him that I could certainly do that, but that I could also write something on my blog about this particular subject.

For the purpose of this post I consider as ‘small words’ only those containing one, two or three letters. However, some four letter words must be included as well because they are intrinsically related as in the case of the small words grouped grammatically as articles.

Every small word can be classified in several grammatical categories. There are lots of nouns like té, pan, paz, can, luz, cal, pus, res, and fin. There are however, many other small words that fall on to certain categories that may present the student with a considerable amount of difficulties when trying to understand their role or their usage in structuring meaning in a phrase or sentence.

These small words can be classified in several groups, the most important are: articles – la, el, unas, etc; pronouns of several types – que, te , le, mío, se, etc; verbs – most of them conjugated forms such as voy, va, fui, ríe, or des, adverbs like tan, mal, sí , ya, allá, aún/aun or muy; conjunctions such as y, o, or ni and prepositions like por, para, a, de or en.

There are also some adjectives of several types that are also small words, such as mal, un, una, qué, mi, tu, or su.

It is obvious that a full classification of all these words can’t be presented here, especially in relation to nouns. A complete list of grammatical structures such as articles, pronouns, adverbs and conjunctions can be found in any good Spanish grammatical source.

Students must be taught about how to use these extremely important grammatical structures and try learning as many as possible of them in order to be fully competent speakers and write Spanish properly. Preferably these words should be learnt in contextual situations, but this does not exclude the possibility of learning them in their pure grammatical forms.

Making correct usage of these ‘small words’ is more important than knowing their grammatical classifications. Students can also create their own classification charts of these words if they wish to make sure that they can have a clear knowledge of the grammatical labels and language meanings that are applied to them.

Can language usage be poor or vulgar?

In Culture, Education, Language, Language learning, Learning Process, Second Language Learning, Spanish on October 17, 2008 at 10:39 am

I haven’t been able to write a post for quite a while. But there is plenty to write about, especially in relation to many of the news found in elcastellano.org website. One of the news items is about some Spanish language academies criticizing what they see as “a vulgarization of the Spanish language” by radio and television media in the Spanish speaking countries.

On the other hand I’m reading at the moment a really interesting and magnificent book about the nature of language. The book is “The Unfolding of Language” by Guy Deutscher. By reading this text I have been able to understand more closely some more aspects in relation with the scientific, social and cultural nature of language.

Deutscher presents in his work some very comprehensive analyses about the way in which all languages have historically evolved. How every living tongue used by any speaker is the result of complex and subtle never ending changing processes. I recommend this book to any person interested in getting a good grasp of the fascinating way in which all languages evolve and keep forever changing their intrinsic nature.

The news article I’m talking about here attracted my attention because it fits with the line of thought presented by “The Unfolding of Language”. Deutscher Lists a historical account of how since ancient  times until the present there has been a constant criticizing of the way language is used in the social setting; of how “language usage has always been superior” at a certain point in the past. He presents us with detailed analyses of why arguing about any perceived superior language usage in past epochs exists only in the mind of the person making such judgement.

What I’ve learned from this excellent book is that no matter from what point of view a language is analysed, the only judgement that any sensible person can pass about the nature of language – especially of the particular  ways in which it is used by a large human group – is one of open-mindedness and of critic outlook at the amazing wonder of what we call language.

Language usage cannot be legislated, controlled or imposed in any given manner. If the media presents a “vulgar” or poor language usage can only be the result of the social context where that particular usage is taking place.

What I’m saying here doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t be an encouragement for everyone to have a “better” usage of  language as registered in the grammatical rules or prevalent social conventions. The real issue here, however, it’s to do with with the fact that the quality of the language used by any group of people has nothing to do with the assumption that their particular language usage is better, poorer or of vulgar character.

Some more facts about Spanish in the Philippines

In Culture, Education, Foreign Language Learning, Language, Language learning, Second Language Learning, Spanish, Spanish Language Learning on August 23, 2008 at 12:06 pm

Late last year I wrote a post here about the proposal of reintroducing the teaching of Spanish in the school system of the Philippines.

My post has generated many responses. It has been in fact the most popular of my post since I started this blog. Since the time I wrote it I’ve found out some other facts relating to the history and nature of the Spanish language presence in the Philippines.

  1. During the colonial period (over three centuries) Spanish was the language used for administrative purposes, however, there was never a massive immigration of Spanish colonists as the Philippines didn’t have the economic potential of Mexico or Peru.
  2. The preaching of the gospels and the overall propagation of Christianity was mostly carried out via the native languages.
  3. Spain as colonial master only made the teaching of Spanish compulsory quite late in the 18th century.

Based on Ostler (2005:377 – 379)

Point 1 translates into a situation where a language doesn’t need to be used or maintained and consequently naturally reproduced by new generations of native speakers. The lack of enough native Spanish colonists didn’t provide the necessary environment for Spanish to have an initial firm hold at a greater scale during the period of the Spanish domination of this country. Ostler (2005) also lists the case of Dutch, as a colonial language with similarities to the fate of Spanish in the Philippines’ context. (p 395-403)

Apart from the primary role of the family for the maintenance of a language and the role played by a same language group setting to achieve this same goal, a language is propagated by organised school systems. Spain’s late response to the need to teach the general population Spanish together with the effects caused by the other two factors listed above may be assigned as the main reasons for Spanish not to have taken firm roots in the Philippines.

Bibliography

Ostler, Nicholas. Empires of the Word (Harper Perennial, 2005)

Spanish Phonology – is neither hard nor dry

In Foreign Language Learning, Language, Language learning, Phonetics & Phonology, Second Language Learning, Spanish, Spanish Language Learning on August 12, 2008 at 3:38 pm

To achieve success in the learning process of a second language, students need to acquire a high level of understanding of the phonological features of the language they’re studying. This can be done in the medium to long term by direct and continuos exposure to the sounds patterns of that language; conversely they can endeavour to systematically study those patterns and their properties.

Phonetics and phonology are two aspects of the nature of language in relation to second language teaching and learning that I find extremely fascinating. There are so many aspects to consider when we focus on the true nature of the spoken language; I mean the type of speech used on daily basis by a given human group or what is also called a dialect of a language.

The study of the phonological patterns of the Spanish language can be seen from many angles. From the amount of sounds that exist in its language varieties or dialects, Spanish doesn’t have the sound complexities of English for example. Most of the sounds found in all Spanish dialectical forms, are quite easy to master for most second language learners.

Standard Spanish has very few sounds that may represent a major learning problem for most people studying it as a second language. These learners soon find out, for example, that in this language variety a prominent distinctive sound pattern is the one represented by letter z in combination with any vowel and c with e and i. This is perceived that way mainly because those phonological features of Spanish are not pronounced in the same manner in the Peninsular (European) and American Spanish dialectical forms.

As a matter of fact there are several distinctive sound patterns among the Spanish dialectical forms; however, the case mentioned above is one of the first sounds that students become more aware of or may be presented with in the language classroom. As soon as they start to find out more about the nature of the other sounds that are found in the American Spanish dialectical varieties, like the aspiration of s in final positions or the several pronunciations for ll, they realize that the phonology of this language rather than complex is rich and varied.

In my long experience as Spanish teacher to adults, I have always taught Spanish phonology based on a structured yet simple way which uses the International Phonetic Alphabet as the main methodological tool. However, I’ve always presented the subject based on a general or standard model, except in relation to the sound of z and c in the manner referred to above. It has only been through my own study and classroom practice that I have managed to get into the finer aspects of the phonology of my mother tongue.

A few moths ago I was trying to find some information about a particular sound and I came across a link containing an almost complete description of all the sounds patterns of the main dialectical varieties of Spanish. The link is by the University of Iowa.

It was only in one of those moments of hunger for learning that I decided to study what there was in the link. And to my amazement I came to understand quite a few other aspects of the Spanish phonology that weren’t still quite clear to me. The link presents the Spanish phonological patterns in a detailed and illustrated manner that provides audio-visual aids to understand the finer linguistic terms associated with the scientific study of language.

I found the information provided by the University of Iowa on the classification of the properties of the sounds of the Spanish language to be one of the most thorough analyses of the phonological patterns of this language that I’ve ever encountered. It provided me with a much defined panorama of this subject especially in relation to getting acquainted with the linguistic jargon associated with the complex nature of the phonetics and phonology fields.

I have added here a link to the excellent chart of the phonological properties of Spanish language provided by the University of Iowa. It’s not only easy to understand; it’s also an intellectually refreshing challenge for the student of Spanish as a second language, since it’s presented in Spanish!

The study of Spanish phonology can be a very fascinating endeavour for any person interested in getting a fuller understanding of this subject. This type of study, however, must go beyond a quick glance at the convoluted and often superficial explanations of the sounds of Spanish as given by most dictionaries or to just trying to make some sense of the complex range of  the phonetic symbols listed in the general IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) chart.

The Spanish personal pronouns tú and vos

In Education, Foreign Language Learning, Language, Language learning, Second Language Learning, Spanish, Spanish Language Learning on June 1, 2008 at 12:34 pm

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

In Education, Foreign Language Learning, Language, Language learning, Second Language Learning, Spanish, Spanish Language Learning on May 3, 2008 at 3:42 pm

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.

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

In Culture, Education, Foreign Language Learning, Language, Language learning, Second Language Learning, Spanish, Spanish Language Learning on March 29, 2008 at 3:42 pm

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

In Culture, Education, Language, Language learning, Second Language Learning, Spanish on March 9, 2008 at 1:35 am

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

In Foreign Language Learning, Language, Language learning, Spanish, Spanish Language Learning, etymology on March 1, 2008 at 12:31 pm

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

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.

The indelible presence of the Nahuatl language in modern Spanish

In Culture, Education, Language, Language learning, Spanish, Spanish Language Learning on January 27, 2008 at 4:41 am

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


Digitalized libraries from Spanish speaking countries are great online treasures

In Culture, Education, Language, Language learning, Spanish, Spanish Language Learning on January 7, 2008 at 11:56 am

As a Spanish language teaching specialist I need to always be surrounded by books, magazines, newspapers… written material of any kind related with or about the Spanish language, preferably in Spanish.

Before the advent of the digital era, most written documents were only available as hard copies, i.e. printed on paper. Nowadays, lots of cultural institutions from everywhere – especially libraries – are bringing their written treasures online for the benefit of humanity.

Today I navigated the august pages of the Biblioteca Nacional de España (The National Library of Spain) and found to my surprise, that they still haven’t put their books online; however they say on the website, that they’re planning to do so soon. Nevertheless, they have a hemeroteca digital which includes newspapers and magazines from Spain that were first published the 1800’s.

Also today I visited the Biblioteca Ayacucho. Here there are a number of treasures from Spanish and Hispanic American literature, in PDF format, which can be downloaded for free. I downloaded the book Comentarios Reales by Garcilaso de la Vega from this website. This is a classic book that I’ve been searching for a long time. I finally found it and it didn’t cost me a cent!

I will be adding here some more ‘bibliotecas digitales’ and other sites containing digitalized written material as I get to find them. The only point of concern is that getting to find these websites and exploring what they offer (and writing a post like this), is consuming my time as if there isn’t other things to do; such as taking a break from the pc, which I must… :)

Some last words though…I have added these two magnificent websites to my blogroll here. Enjoy!

The intrinsic value of speaking other languages and of being bilingual

In Culture, Education, Foreign Language Learning, Language, Language learning, Second Language Learning, Spanish on January 5, 2008 at 7:07 am

A few days ago I read an article in The Age connected to the importance of languages in general and second language learning, in particular, for individuals and people. The article also says that 2008 has been declared the International Year of Languages by the United Nations.

A language of any type, especially a natural one – i.e. a language learnt and spoken natively by people – is an amazing tool for creating and exchanging meaning, with no parallel in any other area of human activity involved in the civilization process.

A language, then, as a special way of organizing thought in the spoken and written modes and as a communication tool is a very important human feature that deserves to be learned, or at least be studied by non natives of that language. Reading ‘Empires of the Word a Language History of the World’ by Nicholas Ostler has helped me to understand these aspects in a clearer manner.

In Ostler’s book there are detailed descriptions of the role that languages – used either as native or second mean of communication – have played in shaping human history since the most ancient of times until now. Since the very early beginnings, individuals and social groups, living in normal conditions, have taken as a goal to learn the languages of their neighbors as a way of conducting trade, commerce and diplomacy or simply for showing goodwill to speakers of other tongues.

In modern times people still learn languages following similar paths as the ones described above. However, they also learn a second (or third or forth…) language for fun, namely, the great intellectual satisfaction that is obtained by communicating in the same language with people whose native tongue is different to ours’.

I became a bilingual person in my youth. Now I can exchange ideas in at least five other languages. Nevertheless, I consider myself a truly bilingual person due to the fact that English and Spanish are the languages that I use on a daily basis.

Both Spanish and English are essential parts of my identity now. In both languages I find an immense array of intellectual satisfaction. I can move in the two worlds with ease. This is something of great value if we take into consideration that each of these languages are repositories of vast bodies of language and knowledge to keep a letters’ lover attached to them forever.

I don’t know any longer what the feeling of being a monolingual person is. What I do know however, it’s that knowing other languages and being fully bilingual is a feeling which is not only unique; it’s humanizing to the highest degree.

‘I love chocolate’ …I know that, but do you know about the origin of the word chocolate?

In Education, Language, Language learning, Second Language Learning, Spanish, Spanish Language Learning, etymology on December 29, 2007 at 11:45 am

In my professional teaching experience it’s very common to find out that many students are often unaware about lots of the aspects relating to the nature of the Spanish language vocabulary when they start their learning process.

For example, they often find it surprising that a Spanish word like chocolate or tomate comes from Pre-Columbian languages. Most of them tend to assume that terms like these are naturally derived from English words; so when I explain to them that these structures come from Native American languages they take it as a very new fact to them.

All the native tongues from the American continent – either dead or still in current use – have made an outstanding contribution to the enrichment of the Spanish language. There is a vast amount of words which have already been officially included into Spanish dictionaries; however, there still are an even larger amount of them which are still waiting to be incorporated into such dictionaries.

These language structures are commonly referred to as Americanisms. All these terms come mainly from Amerind (or Pre-Columbian) languages, which have found a path into spoken and written varieties of Spanish and are generally used by native Spanish speakers in their daily language. Because of this factor, they must be included into dictionaries as a matter of fact.

What it really matters from the linguistic perspective it’s that the terms to which we are making reference here, are vernacular items belonging to the lexicon of a regional or national group of native Spanish speakers; thus there is no need to apply other considerations in order for them to be included into any particular type of dictionary which may be released by a publishing house or for the words to be admitted by a Spanish language academy.

The main purpose of any language dictionary is to provide a complete list of all the words which are actually used by any sizeable amount of its speakers.

Spanish to be reintroduced as school subject in the Philippines

In Culture, Education, Language, Language learning, Spanish, Spanish Language Learning on December 26, 2007 at 1:14 pm

The website elcastellano.org/noticia informs that Spanish is to make a return to the Philippines’ school system. It says that the announcement was made by President Gloria Arroyo in a visit to Spain at the beginning of this month.

The news item gives a historical detail of the main aspects related to the Philippine’s connection with Spanish language and culture.

It says that the decision to reintroduce Spanish to the education system of the Philippines will contribute to bring back this country to the historical roots it shares with the rest of Spanish speaking countries of the world, in particular those from Latin America.

Since the time it was discovered and colonized by Spain in 1521, Spanish became for 350 years the official language of this nation. The Philippines was part of the last colonies of Spain which it lost in 1898 in the Spanish-American war. After independence in 1946, Spanish was reinstated in the school curriculum but it was withdrawn from it during the Marcos’ era and has since then lost its place in the educational system of the Philippines.

Despite the fact of being a Spanish possession for such a long time, the Castilian tongue didn’t become the main communication vehicle for the majority of the the Philippinians, who remained using their vernacular languages, which were nonetheless permeated by Spanish especially in the lexical area.

The historical details for the Spanish language not to have taken a firm hold in the Philippines are too complex to be examined in a short post like this.

It’s worthy to note that this news item also mentions that eighty percent of the Philippines’ historical documents are written in Spanish. This is a fact that I didn’t know until now.

Spanish is a language closely connected to the history and culture of the Philippines. The teaching of this language at all levels of the educational system in that country will make a great contribution for its people – among other things – to know, to study and research in their original source more than three and half centuries of its past which is written in Spanish.

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Two Pre-Roman phonological features adopted permanently by Spanish

In Foreign Language Learning, Language, Language learning, Phonetics & Phonology, Second Language Learning, Spanish, Spanish Language Learning on December 22, 2007 at 4:50 am

The trilled (very marked and rolled) sound of the combination rr as found in perro, barro or tierra and in letter r as in dormir or tener, is one of the most difficult – if not the most difficult – sound encountered by most people learning Spanish as a second language.

Well, I must tell my students from now on not to blame the ancient Romans for their predicament, as this particular sound was brought into the developing Castilian tongue by Basque language speakers in medieval times.

I always thought of the trilled r as a feature of the Latin language that was inherited by Spanish. But just last night in ‘La Página del Idioma Español ‘ at elcastellano.org, I read an article by Sergio Zamora in which he names this sound and the dropping of the phoneme represented by f in ancient Latin words but since then substituted by a silent h, in words like harina, hierro and humo, as two features of the Basque language adopted by Spanish very early in its gestation process.

Zamora points out that the suffixes rro, [rra, rre, etc] and the absence of the phoneme for f, were two clear traits of Basque before they were transferred as phonological features of Castilian Spanish.

Basque is an ancient Non-Roman language that has left its imprint in these two phonological properties still present in all modern Spanish varieties. These two language aspects made a significant contribution towards distinguishing Castilian Spanish from all the other languages derived from Latin such as Galician, Portuguese and Catalan that were developing simultaneously in the Iberian Peninsula.

Corpus of Spanish offering 100 million + words

In Culture, Education, Language, Language learning, Second Language Learning, Spanish, Spanish Language Learning on December 20, 2007 at 3:20 pm

I’ve just opened an email from elcastellano.org reporting of an interview with Dr Mark Davies from Brigham Young University in which he talks about the benefits that his work on a corpus of the Spanish language, can provide to people interested in the aspects of written and spoken Spanish.

The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics by P. H. Matthews defines the term corpus in the first sentence to this entry as
Any systematic collection of speech or writing in a language or variety of a language.

Spanish possesses a vast oral and written corpus which can, with the help of the new IT technologies and the arduous work of academics like Dr Davies, be now available to the general public and Spanish language researchers.

This excellent corpus del español (http://www.corpusdelespanol.org/) is an invaluable tool to research aspects connected to the evolution of the Spanish language as the documents entered in its database comprise a very large amount of historical material going as far back as the 1200’s.

Any word, phrase, or combination of words in any given form can be searched for at the corpus del español website. Apart from the historical aspects connected with the language structures a person may be searching for, they can also search for terms as used by academia, the news, fictional writing and oral language.

Like for the corpus of any language, Dr Davies’ work is complex and therefore difficult to explain its mechanisms in a brief post like this. The best approach – in my opinion – is to spend some time at his website and follow the instructions given there.

I’ve only been able to have a quick look at this website. I’m pretty sure that I’ll be using it at a regular basis. I’m adding it right now to my links here.

The Corpus of Spanish by Dr Davies is a primary resource for any person wanting to know in detail aspects relating to the historical, syntactic, and semantic nature of the Spanish language.

Spanish is the fourth most important language in the world

In Culture, Language, Language learning, Spanish, Spanish Language Learning on December 18, 2007 at 4:54 am

Yesterday I bought the book Empires of the Word a Language History of the World by Nicholas Ostler. I’m sure it’ll be a fascinating summer holiday reading.

Skimming the book’s index I found that the author lists in one of its last chapters the current top twenty languages of the world as spoken by native and non native users. According to his list only Mandarin Chinese, English and Hindi are above Spanish.

Ostler quotes the number of people speaking Spanish at 417 million.

Considering that Spanish is the official language in twenty one nations and that the birth demographic indexes in those nations are still growing very fast, the figure quoted above is only bound to get bigger in the foreseeable future.

Spanish with all its phonological advantages (i.e. simple sound patterns), rich and vast lexical repertoire, sophisticated verbal structures and tenses – and not to mention its Latin inherited charm – is a language with a bright future that has a lot to offer to its native and non native speakers.

The word ‘resiliencia’ came to Spanish via English

In Foreign Language Learning, Language, Language learning, Second Language Learning, Spanish, Spanish Language Learning, etymology on December 15, 2007 at 1:35 am

Until today I didn’t know that the word ‘resiliencia’ was used in Spanish. I have always used resilience or resilient as terms fully associated with the English language. Then today I received in my mailbox an email from ‘La Palabra del Día’ (www.elcastellano.org/palabra.html), in which as usual for this excellent service, it provides a very thorough explanation about the etymology of this word.

According to La Palabra del Día, the word resiliencia is not listed in Spanish dictionaries but it says that it’s a term widely used in physics and the social sciences. All of these aspects are new to me!

A big surprise was to find out – although I suspected it – that the word resiliencia and its English cousins (i.e. cognates) like resilience or resilient all originated from Latin. However, the biggest surprise was to know that the word in reference here came to Spanish via the English language.

It was very interesting to know that resiliencia didn’t arrive into Spanish from Latin; that it wasn’t a vernacular Spanish term as I’d expected it to be, if I followed the logic that Spanish is a language almost completely derived from Latin. The analysis of this word explains that resiliencia in its English equivalents was first used in this tongue before being transferred to Spanish, a language derived from the source that gave origin to this term!

The people behind La Palabra del Día at elcastellano.org must be congratulated for maintaining this very excellent service for the study of Spanish, which makes the understanding of the deeper meanings of words a fascinating and intellectually challenging task.

P.S:
It’s also important to note here, that this word in spite of its etymological roots – i.e. that of being so closely associated with the intrinsic nature of Spanish – and of its practical usage in contributing to the enrichment of this language, has not yet been incorporated into the dictionaries as pointed out by La Palabra del Día.

The word resiliencia is not an isolated case, there are thousands and thousands of words, especially of Americanisms (words vernacular to Hispanic America) which for very convoluted reasoning from language academies, find their particular paths of inclusion into Spanish language dictionaries, to be a very difficult and bureaucratic process. But enough of this, I’ll add more to this subject in a future post.

Below I reproduce the text found in La Palabra del Día.

Resiliencia

Esta palabra no se encuentra en los diccionarios castellanos, aunque es muy usada en la Física y en las ciencias sociales. El vocablo nos llegó desde el inglés resilience para expresar la capacidad de un material de recuperar su forma original después de haber sido sometido a altas presiones; en esa acepción, equivale a la cantidad energía que un material es capaz de almacenar cuando la presión lo obliga a reducir su volumen, y se expresa en julios por metro cúbico.

El psiquiatra infantil Michael Rutter (1970) y el neurólogo, psiquiatra y etólogo francés contemporáneo Boris Cyrulnik, inspirados en el concepto físico, introdujeron el término a la Psicología para denominar la capacidad de las personas de superar tragedias o acontecimientos fuertemente traumáticos.

Cyrulnik, cuyos padres judíos fueron asesinados por los nazis, estudió la capacidad de recuperación de los sobrevivientes de los campos de concentración y de niños criados en orfanatos. Resiliencia es una de esas palabras de origen latín que, curiosamente, nos han llegado a través del inglés, en este caso, del vocablo resilience, que a su vez se derivó del latín resilio, -ire, (saltar hacia atrás, volver de un salto) compuesta a su vez por el prefijo re- y el verbo salire (saltar).

Is it called Spanish or Castilian?

In Foreign Language Learning, Language, Language learning, Second Language Learning, Spanish, Spanish Language Learning on December 1, 2007 at 5:36 am

When I was a secondary school student, I used to study the subject ‘castellano’ – Castilian, in English – as part of the curriculum. At that stage it was natural for me to call ‘castellano’ the subject that studies my mother tongue, as for me ‘español’ (Spanish) and the name of the subject were the same thing.

Very often my students ask me whether there is any difference between the two terms. I usually explain that in English, Spanish is more often labeled that way, to denominate the official language of Hispanic America (Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, Cuba, Argentina, etc) and the dominant official language of Spain.

As a school subject, Spanish is generally known as ‘castellano’ in Spanish speaking countries. In English it is more often labeled ‘Spanish’. In Spanish both terms are used interchangeably when speaking about the language in general terms. However, to make reference to its nature, the term ‘Castilian’ takes precedence.

In Spain, ‘Castellano’ is used instead of ‘español’ when is necessary to make very clear that the term refers to ‘Castilian’ and not to any other of the Spanish languages such as Galician or Catalan.

Spanish can also be called ‘Castilian Spanish’ to make the distinction referred to above. Castilian as the main language of Spain has come to be identified as ‘Spanish’, a fact that is quite evident by the popularity of its usage.

Most Spanish speaking countries in South America use the term ‘castellano’ when they are referring to Spanish in general.

In strict terms, the real name of Spanish is Castilian, as this language has its roots in Castile, a region of Spain. On the other hand, ‘Spanish’, as the most popular name for this language in English, can also be used as just another name for the language of Castile. The name ‘Castilian’ is always relevant in order to study features of Spanish relating to its linguistic or historical nature.

On learning Spanish for specific or special purpose

In Foreign Language Learning, Language learning, Learning Process, Second Language Learning, Spanish, Spanish Language Learning on November 25, 2007 at 12:03 pm

 

Last month I wrote a post here, about the nature of Spanish for travel courses. A Spanish course for specific or special purpose doesn’t have the same characteristics as a typical Spanish for travel course as presented on the post in reference. On the other hand, a lengthy Spanish for travel course can certainly be classified within a specific or special purpose category.

A Spanish course for specific or special purpose usually requires a complete learning of all the language features necessary to achieve language competence in a given field. A medical doctor or an electronics engineer, for example, has specific language needs which must be fulfilled by a course designed to satisfy their particular needs.

No course of this nature is exactly the same even if they are intended for an identical field. A biologist may need specific language structures that may differ with a course designed for an enologist (wine industry scientist).

Spanish courses for specific or special courses require that the student learn all the general aspects of Spanish before engaging in the acquisition of the specialized features needed to become an effective user of Spanish in both written and spoken language.

As stated above, to be really effective, a Spanish course for specific or special purpose involves that a student must fully learn all aspects of the language. This implies that the learning process can be time consuming and that the student must be prepared to do a good amount of homework, apart of engaging in a constant tuition arrangement with an experienced Spanish language professional.

The importance of cognate words in the learning process of Spanish

In Education, Language, Language learning, Learning Process, Second Language Learning, Spanish, Spanish Language Learning on November 17, 2007 at 11:46 am

There are lots of words in Spanish that have a very close connection to an English word. Just to tease my students, when studying the sound and structure of some Spanish words, I list orally or on the whiteboard Spanish words such us ‘visible’, ‘posible’ or ‘motor’.

In most cases they find it quite amusing and curious that words like ‘visible’ and ‘motor’ are exactly the same in both languages except for the different pronunciation. Then when I write twice the word ‘visible’ on the whiteboard and asked them to tell me which word is the Spanish or the English word, they really think that I’m going crazy; as for them both words are just the same. Things get sort out when I pronounce either of them as Spanish or English word.

Spanish and English share a vast amount of cognate words. Cognate words share a common origin; however, the meaning of a word can be different. For example the Spanish ’sensitivo’ is not the same as the English ’sensitive’, even though they originate from the same source. The Spanish ’sensible’ and the English ’sensible’ don’t mean the same thing either, even though they look exactly the same!

Students learning Spanish should, if in doubt check with their teacher or a dictionary to make sure that a given cognate word has the meaning that they intend to convey.

Cognates are of great help when pursuing a faster and efficient learning of Spanish as they make the sometimes tedious process of learning vocabulary an easier and more enjoyable task.

Where did the Spanish ‘v’ go? Do you pronounce it like a b, a v or…?

In Foreign Language Learning, Language, Language learning, Phonetics & Phonology, Second Language Learning, Spanish, Spanish Language Learning on November 4, 2007 at 8:02 am

Some of the phonological (sound) patterns of Spanish can seem at first sight an insurmountable challenge for a student learning this language. For lots people who are just starting to learn Spanish, and who are native English speakers, it’s a bit of a shock to find out about the inherent differences that exist between the sounds patterns they know compared to some of the sounds used in the Spanish language. Some of these contrasting sound patterns include the pronunciation in Spanish of the letters b and v.

As a native Spanish speaker I was never fully aware of the nature of these sounds until I started teaching the language and students began to question mi pronunciation of these two letters during their Spanish lessons.

Spanish stopped using a clear differentiation between b and v a long time ago. However it still has two ‘b’ type sounds, but none of them is pronounced as the English v. It can be very helpful to have in mind from the outset, that there is only one of these two sounds which is actually shared in both languages. This sound is the one represented by the letter b as used in English. The letter v as used in a Spanish word does not sound as the English v !

Using the International Phonetic Alphabet symbols, the Spanish letters b (’be’) and v (’uve’) are both represented by either /b/ or /B/. Therefore you must notice that the letters b or v can sound either /b/ or /B/ depending on where they are found in a word. As a result of this, neither of the two letters can exclusively be represented by only one of these two phonetic symbols.

The letters b or v, are pronounced /b/ in words with structures as those found in vino, beso or banco. But when these two letters are found in words such as oveja, cabra or abeja, their pronunciation uses /B/. This sound doesn’t have a direct equivalent in English, so the student very often requires expert help from a language professional in order to achieve acceptable pronunciation ability.

In general terms, achieving the right pronunciation of /B/ is not a very hard task to accomplish. In most cases native English speakers learning Spanish can acquire an acceptable pronunciation of the /B/ sound quite quickly during the initial stages of their learning process or later by direct imitation of native Spanish speakers.

A Spanish speaking gentleman doesn’t need a horse

In Language, Language learning, Second Language Learning, Spanish, Spanish Language Learning, etymology on October 28, 2007 at 12:57 pm

The Spanish word caballero derives from Late Latin caballarius, (horse groom) which in turn comes from Latin caballus (horse), according to The Free Dictionary. Whenever words like this are encountered in my Spanish classes, students find it very curious and amusing to know what the words actually mean.

Caballero in its more widely used modern meaning, gentleman, has nothing to do with caballo – Spanish for horse – judging by its original meanings. How the word acquired the meaning of gentleman, may be related to the fact that owning a horse was a status symbol in medieval times. Other than that, the word doesn’t have any relation to the level of gentleman ness that a man might possess.

In any case, if anything, a caballero may be more suitable labeled ‘cochero’,’ autero’ or ‘carrero’ (derived respectively from the Spanish words coche, auto and carro, all meaning car in English) if we wanted to update the term, as these days most men own cars more often than horses.

Maybe the term caballero should be more equated to ‘hombre gentil’ (gentleman), which is the most appropriate meaning of caballero in ordinary Spanish usage.

Are Spanish for travel courses really effective?

In Foreign Language Learning, Language learning, Second Language Learning, Spanish, Spanish Language Learning on October 20, 2007 at 7:39 am


The label ‘Spanish for Travel Course’ can mean many things depending on the content and length of such course. It’s not the same, for example, a short course of five or even ten lessons than a year long course of forty lessons.

In my own experience as Spanish language tutor, I’ve found that lots of people wanting to learn Spanish for travelling purposes tend to assume that a short course – even one of five lessons – will equip them with the necessary skills to get by when travelling to a Spanish speaking country. That assumption maybe relevant if the student wants to learn the language at a superficial level, which involves learning a fragmented form of the language or what I call ‘gimmick Spanish’. This is the type of language presented by popular commercial language travel guides and the typical short courses offered by language schools.

Those guides and courses present the student with language structures such as:”Quisiera una cerveza, por favor” (”I’d like a beer, please”) or “¿Hay una estación de tren cerca de aquí?” (”Is there a train station nearby?”). Guides and courses of this type may be very convenient for the rushed traveller, but as to how useful the language learnt may be for communication and language development purposes, is entirely a different matter.

Any Spanish for travel course which focus on fragmented language and which is not followed up by continuous learning prior to travel cannot provide the student with firm foundations to tackle the whole body of language. This is so because proper learning and acquisition of language implies that the student in any given situation of spoken language exchange must be able to express ideas with ease. I always explain to my students that by using language as clear as the two examples above, more often than not, they run into the risk of being taken by a native Spanish speaker, as users of language that are in possession of full fluency in Spanish.

I put to my students that the reply to a clear request or question – as the two cited above – may be so overwhelming and so long, to the point that the answers apart of not providing any help may instead contribute to get them into an even more confused situation. Answering an open ended question is a complex process which is very rarely straight forward. For the examples above, requesting a beer may involve the waiter or barman asking in return questions -in Spanish – such as: “What brand of beer would you like”; “Do you want a local or imported beer?”; Would you like a glass for your beer?”; “Would you like to eat something with your beer?”; “Do you want an ale or a lager?”. This is not what the traveller expected! But this is what normally happens. The answer to a question asking for the location of a place may be even more complex.

Short Spanish courses for travel – or labeled any other way – do not provide the necessary language skills for anybody wanting to use Spanish in a natural way with native Spanish speakers. Short Spanish courses can only be effective when they can be followed up by further learning prior to travelling. On the other hand, knowing some Spanish, even in a fragmented way, is better than not knowing Spanish at all.

If short Spanish for travel courses aren’t of much use, what about a long course? A long course implies getting to know more about all aspects of language that facilitate full development of oral and written skills. Read more about this subject later.

Tell us about your own language experiences while travelling within a Spanish speaking country.

Which Spanish accent is the best?

In Foreign Language Learning, Language learning, Second Language Learning, Spanish, Spanish Language Learning on October 12, 2007 at 9:41 am

Throughout my career of teaching Spanish at Tres Culturas and elsewhere, I have often been asked by my students about what accent should be the best for them to use in their spoken Spanish. Without any hesitation I usually reply that they can use any accent they fancy as long as what they’re saying is properly pronounced following the Spanish particular sounds and stress conventions on words, as well as natural speech patterns (i.e. the way that the majority of people normally speak).

The accents people use in their speech respond to a range of linguistic features far too broad to explain briefly. In general terms, accents don’t make any difference to the main role of language, namely to communicate and exchange ideas. A factor contributing to the existence of accents is connected with the intrinsic characteristic of language to differ even within itself, which can happen very often regardless of aspects such as the size of the territory that it’s being considered.

In Spanish, there are a vast amount of accents depending on the country or the particular region a group of its speakers come from. Countries as small as El Salvador, for example, have enough range of accents to keep a linguist studying them, busy for years.

Accents make a language varied and contribute to its ‘charms’ – or ‘detracting’ features – which are very important for the cultural study of the people that use it. However, the aesthetics of the spoken language doesn’t represent a defining factor for its effectiveness; nor does it make the accent used by a group of Spanish speakers better or worse than the accent used by another group in the language. As an accent does not provide any particular objective feature to consider it either good or bad, all accents used by Spanish speakers constitute cultural and mostly natural features that are legitimate by their own nature.

It’s practically impossible for a student to learn or for a teacher to teach all the accents that exist within the Spanish language. So whatever accent the student ends up learning, is always a good accent as long as it’s understood by other native and non-native speakers of the language.

How many varieties of Spanish accents do you know?

Is there a proper type of Spanish?

In Foreign Language Learning, Language learning, Spanish, Spanish Language Learning on October 12, 2007 at 7:47 am

Now and then I get phone calls or emails from people interested in learning ‘proper Spanish’. When I ask them what do they mean by the word ‘proper’ they give me reasons such as “I’ve heard that the Spanish from Latin America is not the same as the one from Spain” or “They say that the Spanish from Spain is very different from Latin American Spanish”. Trying to explain over the phone or email anything related to the nature of language, especially of complex topics like why language variation happens, it’s not an easy task; however, I do my best to help them with their queries.

The nature of language is to change and vary constantly. Spanish is one of the major world languages, spoken by hundreds of millions of people in many countries, most of them in the American continent. The vast amount of speakers creates a high degree of language variation. These variations are particularly evident in relation to the accents and vernacular regional vocabulary and idiomatic expressions used by people. Such variations are in many cases unique to a region or country where Spanish is the native tongue. The variations give origin to the many language varieties that exist within what is called ‘Spanish language’. Most people are acquainted with two broad varieties of this language: The ‘Latin American Spanish’ or in more proper terms – American Spanish – and the ‘Spanish from Spain’. Thus when people refer to ‘proper Spanish’ they may be referring to ‘Standard Spanish’ – the variety which is normally common to all Spanish speakers including native and non-native users.

Standard Spanish is a fully regulated form of this language. This variety is the language type promoted and accepted by the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language and The Association of Spanish Language Academies and it’s the type of Spanish generally taught and used by the school systems and the media. There is not such thing as ‘proper’ or ‘improper’ Spanish. There are only varieties of Spanish and they are all proper. Then when asking about ‘proper Spanish’ it’s better to ask for ‘Standard Spanish’.

Does proper Spanish mean something else for you?

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The usefulness of etymology in the study of Spanish

In Education, Foreign Language Learning, Language, Language learning, Spanish, Spanish Language Learning, etymology on October 11, 2007 at 2:35 pm

 

During my many years of teaching Spanish to students from all walks of life in Melbourne, I have always stressed to them the great benefit that is gained for fast and effective language learning by knowing about the origin of words. This involves finding out where words come from; why they are used in the way they are or why they are written or pronounced in a particular manner. Dealing with the study of the origin of words in a language is the role of etymology – the branch of linguistics that in general terms studies the origin of words – put in a better way, etymology describes the historical ‘résumé’ of any particular word.

By studying a language with an etymological focus it’s possible to discover the deep roots of the word structure(s) and meanings. When students start to know more about the historic changes experienced by words, they may be able and encouraged to learn more effectively and rewardingly all the other aspects relating to the language they are studying. Moreover, being knowledgeable about the intrinsic nature of words can facilitate faster progress in the development of their oral and written skills.

To know about the origin of any particular word in Spanish, students can consult an etymological dictionary. However, finding that kind of dictionaries it’s not an easy task. Therefore, the more practical way to search for the etymology of a word is through the internet. My favorite website for my online consultations is elcastellano.org at its excellent ‘Origen de las palabras’ page. There is a free subscription at www.elcastellano.org/palabra.html to receive the etymology of a word at random periodically.

I find knowing the origin of words a very fascinating issue from both the professional and personal levels. Thus the website in mention has become almost a daily favorite of mine. I searched at that website for the word ‘España’ – Spain, a very special word considering that it is the base for the formation of ‘Español’, the main name of the Spanish language in Spanish. It was very illustrating to know that ‘España’, has a very colorful and interesting origin. elcastellano.org tells us that this word in relation to its written form evolved from the Greek Spanía and Hispanía to the Latin Hispania and that these three words come from the Punic Isephanim. It explains that the Spain may also be derived from the Celtic span or even the Hebrew xaphano, among others, until it reached the present name, ‘España’.

In regard to the historic meaning for this word the website tells us that Isephanim, one of the most recognized words thought to have given origin to the name of Spain in Punic – the language spoken by the ancient Phoenicians in Carthage – meant ‘the island of the rabbits or the coast of the rabbits’, as the Phoenicians were in Andalucía more than 3000 years ago and found that rabbits were a very abundant kind of animal there. It also tells us that because of this meaning the Romans of the times of Emperor Hadrian represented Spain – Hispania – on their coins, as a sitting lady with a rabbit posing at her feet. This is reading of the most stimulating kind!

For a student interested in learning not just the basics, but quite a lot about the origin and meaning of many Spanish words like ‘España’ there is not a better website than elcastellano.org. Their word analyses are generally in depth; which no doubt can stimulate the eager learner to wish for more and more! Students need to have an upper intermediate or advanced level of Spanish language proficiency in order to have a proper understanding of the etymological definitions given there, since it is a Spanish language website. Knowing the original structures of the Spanish words can be of enormous help not only in the study of Spanish, but also of English and all Indo Europeans languages as they share many structural features.

Have you found the etymology of any particular word and how useful was elcastellano.org website for you?