Analyses of Main Traits and Rules of The Spanish Language

The Spanish language has its own set of grammatical rules and culture that has derived from Latin. It has been around for centuries and will continue to do so with the popularity of the bilingual person. Spanish has many similarities to English, one of the main spoken languages in the world, because the languages have branched off from the same origin. It is considered to be one of the Romance languages of the world because of its suave words and complexes. While it may be a smooth language, it is not a language that is less complex than the next one.

Spanish verbs are the heart and subject of any sentence, much similar to that of English verbs. Spanish verb endings are what express “’person’ and ‘number’ and which, optionally, may express ‘mood’, ‘tense’, and ‘aspect’…features may be realized by a single morpheme” (Garcia, 198). It is only a simple verb ending that “realizes several semantic of the main verb, such as ‘third person singular’…’past tense’, and ‘perfect aspect’” (Garcia, 199). Morphemes play a significant role in Spanish, since its clitics “are a closed class of representations intermediate between independent words and bound morphemes…(me, nos, te, os, le, lo, los, la, las, and se)” (Garcia, 205). The conjugations of the sentence are either male or female, which this is depending on what the whole subject is referring too. This would call for the speaker of the sentence to either use lo or los for a masculine subject and la or las for a feminine subject.

The English language has a variety of word compounds that English speakers are highly familiar with. It is a simple equation of two verbs put together to make a noun. An example of this would be breakfast. The word break and fast are put together to make a word meaning the first meal of the day, usually consumed in the morning, that breaks the fast of not eating while one was asleep overnight. Spanish, however, has compound words as well but because of the differences in the languages the compounds and the making up of tend to be more complex. Spanish compounds tend to use a verb and a noun to create a compound word. According to Buenafuentes, “Spanish compounds reflect the syntactic structure of the language and, therefore, no compounds go against this structure” (2). An example of this would be, in English, to sharpen and knives, or a knife grinder. In Spanish, this would take the noun and the verb and the Spanish term would be afilacuchillos. Compounds usually show the noun in its plural form while “the whole compound is singular” (Buenafuentes, 4). To explain further, the Spanish term lavavaplatos is the verb to clean and the noun dishes added together, but would be the proper term for a dishwasher. Anne McCabe explains the Spanish compounds as they “combine nouns and verbs, often using variations of the verb inflection…word for corkscrew is sacacorchos, from the verb sacar (to remove) in the third person singular indicative form, along with corchos, plural for cork” (241).

Spanish derives from the language of Latin, the motherland of all languages. Latin and Spanish “use inflection to signal grammatical categories such as gender, number, case, tense, mood, etc” (Pharies, 101). Spanish is Indo-European and from there “Proto-Indo-European gradually transformed into Castillian around the 13th century” (Pharies, 28). Spanish and English have many similarities but Spanish is considered to have a shallow orthography and “requires a richer conjugation for each subject noun-pronoun” (Ramirez, 339). A family tree of linguistics is in play when most of the languages derive from one main root. From there, “languages are capable of dividing themselves into two or more different varieties” (Pharies, 20). Pharies has also concluded that “Genetic material of languages-their sounds, grammatical structures, and words-remains completely intact, apart from minor changes, from one moment to the next” (19).

The increase of the English language learner dramatically increases by the decade since “Spanish speakers are by far the largest group of language minority speakers…” (Dressler). Even though Spanish and English derive off of the same branch, many centuries ago, cognate awareness is not popular among bilingual speakers. One would think it would be simple from being fluent in Spanish and its complexity of verbs and inflections as well as morphological structures; it would be easy to learn the same in the English language. The conclusion would be simple since “Spanish words that are cognates to academic English words may provide information directly useful in English literacy acquisition” (Dressler). Some English suffixes, such as “-ity, -ing, and –ly are equivalent to the Spanish suffixes –idad, -a/endo and –mente, respectively” (Dressler).

In conclusion, the linguistics of Spanish is no less more complex than English. The verbs in Spanish vary more although, but cover more ground in the language when making compound words or creating syntactic sentences. The two languages derive from the same branch; a branch that has formed many centuries ago but since then has broken off and created new branches of their own. Spanish is a language that is very focused on inflection rather than grammatical correctness in that cultured world of native speaking. Spanish language and its inflection is what make the language what it is today in references to tense, mood, person, and number. It is the history and the growing culture around it of the Spanish language that makes it the widely spoken language it is today.