Questions tagged [spanish]
For linguistic questions about Spanish, one of the most widely spoken Romance languages, also known as Castilian. For non-linguistic questions about the Spanish language, visit our sister site Spanish Language Stack Exchange.
120 questions
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Teaching children Spanish and Esperanto at home from non-native speakers
A question has already been asked on teaching a child a foreign language if you aren't a native speaker, but the answers are mixed - the 'right' answer says languages can be taught by a non-native ...
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Differences between free languages and official languages?
In short: as far as I know, English in the USA has no official standards from the government for how it's to be written and used. There are just dictionaries. Spanish however, has the RAE, which is an ...
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Looking for Spanish varieties/accents
This might not be the right place to ask this, and if so, I apologize. I'm a student conducting research on Spanish varieties and I am wondering if anyone knows where I could find short texts read by ...
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Are there any recent studies on vowels of PRS?
Consonants and their phenomena are well studied for PRS (Puerto Rican Spanish). However, vowels and their phenomena are less well known. Known vowel phenomena in the dialect are unstressed/final vowel ...
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Looking for a thorough comparison of French and Spanish
Either in English, Spanish or French.
I haven't found a comparative grammar but I got pretty excited with this monograph:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Portuguese_and_Spanish
I'm ...
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Which language is the closest lexically to Spanish?
I've found this Worldwide map or data for linguistic distance here when looking for a way to know if Portuguese is the most similar language to Spanish. Unfortunately neither of these languages are in ...
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Natural vs. "Forced" language learning
Would the "natural" way of learning a language (the way we learn our mother tongue) be better even for acquiring second (and third, etc.) languages?
What I mean is:
The "natural" way to learn a ...
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To what extent can Japanese Kana be adapted to the Spanish language and be intelligible?
I have noticed that Spanish phonology is quite similar to that of Japanese and that their syllable structures are both relatively simple.
Say--for instance, that one were to write a Spanish passage ...
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The double ⟨l⟩ in Spanish
In Spanish, some words start with the double consonant graphemes ⟨ll⟩ - that have indeed the value of /ʎ/.
Is there any language that have a similar pattern (starting with double consonants)? What is ...
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Do all colonized countries use formal second pronouns person in daily life?
In Spanish vosotros/tu is used in an informal conversation and usted(es) in an formal one.
Whereas in the majority of the countries in Latin America, usted(es) is used constantly.
The same goes with ...
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Has Russian to Spanish transliteration changed much over the centuries?
I want to know which norms might have governed the spelling of some Russian names which were written down in Spanish around around 1750 - 1850. A number of formal standards exist today, such as ISO 9, ...
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Spanish Stem Change
I'm looking at a set of data right and I'm a bit confused on how to tackle this. The data is showing a stem alternation of some verbs with [e] and [o] and no change in others. I know this is due to ...
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Comprehensive diacritics normalization
I would like to construct a normalization program for text containing diacritics or special symbols. For some languages that I am familiar with, I can obtain a canonical form easily;
German:
ä -> ...
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(Latin) spondeo > (Spanish) esposas?
I am looking for the exact history of the Spanish word esposas ("handcuffs") and its connection with the Latin word spondeo ("promise").
I read several times on the web the ...
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Are Spanish "que" clauses following "parece" complements or postponed subjects?
The Spanish equivalent of It seems that they hate each other is Parece que se odian.
In both languages seem/parecer are one-place predicates (well, both can optionally accept a second argument with ...
user6814
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Deducing a rule out of set of examples
Consider the following Spanish words, written in IPA (with their English translation):
And the same question for middle position and final position
My answer is:
Initial position: Looking at the ...
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Are the Spanish numbers “seis” and “siete” phonetically similar?
This is a variation of this same question in the Spanish Language site, as I was told it was probably better suited here.
When I was learning Japanese (a long time ago in a galaxy far far away), my ...
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Get "part of speech" for a Spanish word
I do a little linguistics as a hobby while working of my own software development projects. I am wondering if there is a database or online api where I can easily establish the possible "parts of ...
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Expressions derived from Italian mafia
I apologize in advance for the explicit words, the question is anyway purely linguistical. Feel free to censore the words if appropriate.
I have heard that the American slang expression "Do not break ...
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How to determine an immediate constituent of a sentence [closed]
I am studying Spanish and Portuguese at university, and I am having some trouble with part of a Spanish linguistics assignment. I would be very grateful if somebody could shed some light on how to ...
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Way to learn foreign languages
It's my first post here.
I was planning for a long time to learn another foreign language. Polish is my mother tongue and I also speak english. Not on a professional level of course but I'm pretty ...
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Predication in X-Bar theory
Where do predicatives (predicative adjectives and nominals) over the subject or over the object fit into an X-bar-tree?
For instance:
Pedro pintó a María sentada.
Peter painted Mary seated. (=...
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Andrea Bocelli Aspiration
I have been listen to Andrea Bocelli's songs lately. A noticeable feature of his pronunciation while singing Spanish songs is that he constantly pronounces the plosives (especially at word-initial ...
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N-gram translations from Spanish to English
I have a large list of n-grams for spoken Spanish. I wish to establish for each n-grams whether or not it represents something idiomatic (phrasal verb, idiom etc.) or not.
For example, these are ...
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What are expressions like «The Dutch have taken Holland» called in linguistics? [closed]
And does anyone by chance know any expressions of this kind in Spanish?
Some others are:
Queen Ann is dead.
It rains a lot in England.
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Italian 'gn' vs Spanish 'ñ' - Why does their use differ intervocalically and word internally?
First some examples. Here are the IPA transcriptions of 'bathroom' in Italian and Spanish:
bagno /baɲɲo/
baño /baɲo/
As you can see in Italian 'gn' becomes a geminate between vowels in the middle of a ...
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Why does Spanish have obsolete tenses?
In Spanish, there are a few tenses that exist but are almost never used in daily life, like the subjunctive future and future perfect tenses. They are only utilized in legal documents and older pieces ...
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Why is Spanish SVO and not VSO?
I understand that Spanish sentences have an SVO sentence structure.
(S)(Yo) (V)compro (O)los zapatos.
What confuses me is the fact that when the subject is a pronoun, it is omitted so often that you ...
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Conjugation stem changes in Portuguese
Currently, I am learning Portuguese. I have some knowledge of Spanish as well.
The biggest difference in conjugation (indicative present tense) that I have found between Spanish and Portuguese is that ...
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Which sounds in spanish sound louder: vowels or consonants?
I think vowels but I'm not so sure. I'm neither sure if vocal cords are what makes a phone be more audible and so what makes vowels be more audible than consonants or some of them.
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What informative and yet easy-to-read introductory books in English are there for Spanish Phonology?
I had my eyes on The Phonology of Spanish by Iggy Roca but I can't find the book in any store, neither it's ISBN or even it's cover! Evidence indicates that it wasn't even published but it pertained ...
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Spanish Dipthongs - Why does the verb Cerrar(to close) experience stem change but cerro (hill) is "fine" as is?
I know that vulgar latin experienced a diphthongization with several of the vowels when in tonic positions of a word.
My specific question is why did all latin originating words not consistantly do ...
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Where did the word ending ar er ir in Spanish come fom?
When I was learning Spanish, I came across the fact that Spanish verbs have three classes: AR, ER, and IR. I notice that more of them have the AR verb ending.
The verb endings are the same in Latin, ...
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Where can I find a set of Spanish-English comparable texts? ***(Not translations)***
This is my very first post, I hope I'm making myself clear.
What I'm asking for is a set of texts that are equivalent in both languages in terms of difficulty, word frequency and register (i.e. two ...
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To be or not to be - you got to be somewhere to be something or you are where you are? [closed]
I wonder, in Spanish we have to different words for to be (location) and to be (description) from my point of view, as a natural Spanish speaker tho I've spoken English all my life, just not as much, ...
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Is “actual” both a false friend and a cognate?
English definition of “actual”:
existing in fact; typically as contrasted with what was intended, expected, or believed.
Spanish definition of “actual”:
current, present, contemporary
These are ...
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Why does the Portuguese language sound similar to French language to me?
I thought Portuguese would sound very close to Spanish. However, to me, it sounds more like French?
Why is that?
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Is the phoneme /a/ in Castilian Spanish pronounced differently in "pan" than in "papa"?
I was taught that the vowels in Spanish are always pronounced the same in contrast to the English language. For this reason, I always pronounced /a/ in "pan" as the same as /a/ in "papa"—this is very ...
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Do the WALS chapters cover the core grammatical structure of Spanish?
How complete is their description for the Spanish language? Is it missing something out? Here is the description http://wals.info/languoid/lect/wals_code_spa
Thank You
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Use of subjunctive in various languages
The subjunctive is most often used when expressing volition. Using English and Spanish as examples:
The doctor recommends that you eat vegetables and fruits.
El médico recomienda que comas verduras y ...
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online word references for Spanish
Creating flashcards for Spanish was a real pain, so I started trying to automate it. What I have now is something can take a list of verbs in the infinitive form and generate flashcards with ...
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Is «plausible» a false friend between English and Spanish? [closed]
I'm a native Spanish speaker and today I was just wondering about this, if it's a case like bizarre and bizarro (which in Spanish means «generous» or «brave», not «weird»).
I couldn't fully ...
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How should I understand these acoustic and perceptive terms from phonetics?
So, while reading the New Grammar of Spanish Language (a book from a very influential institute of the Spanish languague: Royal Spanish Academy) I found out these terms (they'll be in bold) from ...
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Why are native English speakers convinced that English language is a Romance language? [closed]
Most people I've know so far in the USA are always saying that learning Latin would be really easy because, since English comes from Latin, it cannot be a hard thing to do, and they really get shocked ...
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Alemaña/Almanya/ألمانيا etymology
Turkish, Arabic, Spanish for "Germany" are obviously cognate. But not with "Germany" or Deutschland.
At least two of them must be borrowed. Which, and what is the (commonly assumed) source?
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For adjectives which change meaning by position: why are they subjective before nouns but objective after?
Meaning-changing adjectives
[Source:] Some adjectives can mean different things depending on their placement around the noun they modify.
When placed after the noun like normal, the adjective carries ...
user5306
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"Ser"/"estar" acquisition in bilingual children (English-Spanish)
For the last week I've been wondering about how bilingual children (English-Spanish) might struggle with the acquisition of the "ser"/"estar" copulas, considering how these are ...
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Looking for socio research on "Latinx"
I'll crib the intro from Wikipedia:
Latinx is a gender-neutral English neologism, sometimes used to refer to people of Latin American cultural or ethnic identity in the United States.
"Latinx&...
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Etymological development of forms of Spanish "seguir" from Latin "SEQVI" (*sequire)
I am seeking an explanation for the development of the forms of Spanish "seguir" from Latin "SEQVI" (Vulgar Latin: *sequire), especially the irregular forms.
Especially, why did the "e" become "i" in ...
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Searching for a Spanish word list for statistical analysis [closed]
I need a Spanish word list, as simple as that.
The more complete it is, the better, it should contain as many words as to be a statistically relevant sample.
It can be in any format: XML, MS Excel, ....
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