the top 10 reasons why spanish is special
TRANSCRIPT
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The top 10 reasonswhy Spanish is special
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1. Spanish is a major world language
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• More than 400 million people speak Spanish as a first
language, making it the #2 language in the world, after
Mandarin Chinese and ahead of English.
• Spanish is an official language in 21 countries in Europe,
Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas.
• It is the #3 language on the Internet, judging by its number
of Internet users (according to InternetWorldStats.com).
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2. Spanish is proudly international
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• Every Spanish-speaking country (including the U.S.A.) has a
Spanish language Academy whose members are professors,
writers, journalists, and so on.
• Representatives of these Academies from around the world meet
periodically to debate language issues. For example, in 1994 they
voted to eliminate ch and ll from the Spanish alphabet.
• They also publish grammar guides and dictionaries that
incorporate both European and Latin American Spanish.
• No other international language has a comparable system.
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3. Military might, not cultural clout,made Spanish a national language
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• Most European languages spread from long-established cultural
centers (London, Paris, Moscow, etc.).
• In other cases a famous writer, such as Dante (Italian) or Martin
Luther (German) set the national standard.
• In contrast, Spanish originated in the provincial city of Burgos, the
hometown of El Cid, Spain’s national hero, in the region of Castile.
• As the Catholic armies gradually retook Spain from its Moorish
occupiers, Castilian Spanish came to dominate the country.
• Madrid became the capital city only late in this process.
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4. Spanish is the only language that uses the upside-down ¡ and ¿ marks
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• The ¡ and ¿ marks were invented by the Real Academia Española
(the official academic body of the Spanish language) in 1754.
• The goal was to give readers a heads-up at the beginning of an
exclamation or question.
• This followed a failed attempt to use the regular ! and ? marks for
this purpose.
• No other language has ever adopted ¡ and ¿.
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5. Spanish doesn’t use apostrophes
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• Apostrophes are used in all other Western Romance languages: French
(e.g. j’ai for je + ai), Portuguese, Catalan, and Italian.
• They are also used in English and most other languages written in the
Roman alphabet (some exceptions are Polish and Hungarian)…
• … and in some languages written in other alphabets (Greek, Ukrainian).
• Essentially, Spanish doesn’t need the apostrophe because it doesn’t
drop sounds.
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6. Spanish is one of the few languageswith the th sound
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• The th sound (as in English thing), which linguists write as /θ/, is a
hallmark of Castilian Spanish, spoken in Madrid and northern Spain.
• This sound is as rare worldwide as the clicks of African languages like Zulu.
• It evolved in the 15th - 17th centuries when the Old Spanish ts and dz
sounds merged into a kind of an s, which then moved forward in the
mouth to form th.
• In contrast, in southern Spain and the New World these sounds merged
with regular s.
• Other changes at the same time eliminated the z sound (but not the letter
z) and created the /x/ sound heard at the beginning of José and genial.
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7. Spanish has many ways to talk about the past
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• The previous slide shows eight common grammatical
forms that are used to talk about the past in Spanish.
• Of the 64 languages studied by linguist Östen Dahl, only
Kikuyu, a Bantu language of Africa, had a comparable
number of past tense expressions.
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8. Spanish has two perfectly grammatical alternative sets of endings for a single verb form (the imperfect subjunctive)
• Ojalá que fuera/fuese rico.
‘I wish I were rich’.
• Quería que hubiéramos/hubiésemos venido.
‘She wished we had come.’
• Dudé que me amaran/amasen.
‘I doubted that they loved me.’
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• The -ra form of the imperfect subjunctive (as in fuera,
hubiéramos, and amaran on the previous slide) is both more
recent and more common than the -se form.
• However, they are both understood throughout the Spanish-
speaking world, and can even alternate within a single sentence.
• This is the only case I’m aware of, in any language, of this kind of
duplication.
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9. Spanish vocabulary comes from everywhere!
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• Latin gave Spanish its initial vocabulary, and in the last millenium has
continued to be an active source of new borrowings.
• Other sources of Spanish vocabulary include Celtic, Basque, Arabic,
Visigothic, Greek, French, other Romance languages, English, and the
indigenous languages of Latin America.
• Approximately 1/3 of Spanish vocabulary comes from its initial Latin
core, 1/3 from later Latin borrowings, and 1/3 from other sources.
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10. En means both ‘in’ and ‘on’
La fruta está en el tazón.‘The fruit is in the bowl.’
El tazón está en la mesa. ‘The bowl is on the table.’
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• It’s unusual for a language to combine the notions of ‘in’
and ‘on’. Spanish (and Portuguese) are well-known
exceptions.
• Some languages even break down the notion of ‘on’ into
finer categories, such as ‘resting on a supporting surface’
(like the bowl on the table) versus ‘permanently attached’
(like a handle on a door).
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SUMMARY
• 1-3: Spanish is special from a social perspective. It is a major world language that is proudly international, and that gained prominence for military rather than cultural reasons.
• 4-5: Written Spanish is special because it uses ¡ and ¿ and not the apostrophe.
• 6: Spoken Castilian Spanish is special because it has the th sound.• 7-8: Spanish grammar is special because it has so many ways to talk
about the past, including two versions of the imperfect subjunctive.• 9-10: Spanish vocabulary is special because it comes from so many
different sources. A specific vocabulary oddity is the merger of the ‘on’ and ‘in’ concepts in the Spanish preposition en.
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You can now pre-orderJudy Hochberg’s book
¿Por qué? 101 Questions about Spanish(Bloomsbury Academic Press)