4 ms·
While I agree with many of your points comparing Spanish and English, I disagree with several points: In Spanish, word order is more fluid than in English--gre
by ternaryoperator 6y ago
While I agree with many of your points comparing Spanish and English, I disagree with several points:
In Spanish, word order is more fluid than in English--greatly facilitated by the fact that the person (1st, 2nd, 3rd...) of a verb is an ending rather than a separate pronoun. You can quite acceptably start sentences with subject, verb, direct object, even indirect object.
And while there are more rules than in English, there is also a much greater dependence on context to understand basic meaning. If you use loismo, 'lo' can refer to: you, he, she, it. If you don't pick up on a sometimes subtle contextual marker, you can quickly be talking at cross-purposes. The need for context also results from the much smaller vocabulary in Spanish, so meaning has to be interpolated by context or remain imprecise. (As a visual demonstration, look at any Spanish-English dictionary and see how much wider the English-to-Spanish section is than its counterpart.)
Your view that spelling = correct pronunciation is not as ironclad as you make it out to be. It has exceptions: Mexico and Texas being a prime examples--the x being pronounced like a jota.
I agree overall that Spanish has a clearer grammar that is more widely applied, but I don't think it's nearly as clearly defined as you make it out to be.
- leephillips 6y agoI agree with all this - especially the point about Mexico, etc. I was exaggerating a bit to bring out the contrasts, and as a student and someone learning how to teach the language, these contrasts seem stronger to me than they really are.
- the_gipsy 6y agoIt's either Mexico and Texas, or Méjico and Tejas. Someone might mix across languages, but that does not mean that there is actually a formal exception to the rule.
- ternaryoperator 6y agoNot at all. In Mexico, it's written México and pronounced Méjico. So that is definitely an exception to the pronunciation of x as a ks sound. The spelling rule you imply is not correct either: the same Spanish speakers who write Texas for the state, write Tejano for the Latin music originating there--both of those spellings being the most widespread in both Texas and Mexico.
- the_gipsy 6y agoSo I dug this up a bit, because I'm accustomed to the form "Méjico" in Spain. You are right that México is written with an X but pronounced with a jota. However it has a special status of topónimo (place name), which sometimes don't have a translation (thank god). E.g. "Washington" is not pronounced with a sharp S, it's just pronounced as in the original language. Or Wyoming is pronounced as "uaióming", not "bioming". Which is exactly what happens with México, in old spanish the X was pronounced as jota. https://www.rae.es/dpd/M%C3%A9xico https://www.rae.es/dpd/M%C3%A9xico
- ternaryoperator 6y agoYup, it's historical--like almost everything in languages ;-)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- CannisterFlux 6y agoSpelling = correct pronunciation in Spanish is like 99.9% correct. The exceptions are almost always imported words. Even the tildes help you out to know how to pronounce a word you haven't seen before completely correctly, with the right stresses on each syllable. English is an embarrassment in comparison. If we did a total overhaul and simplification of English to remove all the inconsistencies, it'd be far easier to learn for everyone going forward (albeit at the inconvenience of everyone alive today).