the list of 9 for october 24, 2008:
NINE WAYS IN WHICH SPANISH IS BETTER THAN ENGLISH
This week I finally finished up my Spanish classes after two years and four months. I feel likeI've learned all I can for now, even though there is still clearly much more to learn. (In otherwords, I'm nowhere near fluent, but I'm pretty well-versed for a tourist.) Learning a languagemakes me think about English, too, and what a strange, frustrating, complicated, useful andbeautiful language it is. I still think it's the most fascinating language in the world. But hereare nine ways in which Spanish is better:
- Amigo/amiga. Spanish has both male and female versions ofmany nouns, but it's the word "friend" that has tortured many an English speaker (or, more to thepoint, English listener) who has been secretly in love with somebody: "I was with a friend lastnight." "Can I bring a friend?" "I'm going to Europe with a friend." How much less confused wewould be if we could tell right away whether this friend was male or female.
- Novio/novia. Similarly, "boyfriend" and "girlfriend"contain some level of ambiguity in English. (Well, at least "girlfriend" does. You don't hear manyguys referring to their male pals as their boyfriends.) If a woman says, "My girlfriend and I wentshopping last night," does she mean her platonic female friend or her lesbian lover? A Spanishspeaker would simply use "amiga" for the former, "novia" for the latter, and that would makeeverything clear.
- The plural you. Spanish speakers say "Ustedes." Some alsouse the informal "vosotros." In any event, Spanish, like many other non-English languages,includes the extremely useful plural form of "you" - a different pronoun to use when talking totwo or more people. The best we can do in English is to say "y'all" in the South, "yous" in NewJersey, and the half-hearted "you guys" everywhere else. Terrible. Again, you can easily see howthis can get people in trouble: phrases like "I want you to come to my house for dinner" sureleave a lot of room for interpretation. Me alone? Me and my wife? What's your intention here?(That said, I'm no fan of languages like Spanish that still use both formal and informal forms of"you"; all it does is force you to learn more verb conjugations.)
- Different ways to say "I love you." You can sense a trendthat English provides many pitfalls for the nervous single person looking for love - pitfalls whichdon't exist in Spanish. For example, "I love you" can mean many different things in English and issometimes disastrously misinterpreted. But in Spanish, "te amo" means "I love you romantically"and "te quiero" means "I love you as a friend or relative." How convenient. (Off-topic: pointstaken off from Spanish for the confusing verb "esperar," which means to wait, to hope forand to expect.)
- The double, triple, quadruple negative. One strict Englishrule is that a double negative is wrong, and makes you sound uneducated: "I don't have no money."But that's perfect Spanish! In fact, it's absolutely fine to say, in Spanish, "I don't have nomoney never," if you want to emphasize your penniless situation. And I think that's great.
- Everything is phonetic. Okay, not everything: you do have"LL" sounding like "Y", and "C" and "G" each have two sounds in Spanish, hard and soft, dependingon which vowel follows it. But that's it. And even those follow strict rules. Otherwise,every letter makes exactly one sound, and accent symbols tell you where to, well, put the accent.Meanwhile, look at the mess that is English. How, for example, can anyone tell by sight that the"ough" in through, rough, bough and thorough should be pronounced four different ways?
- No tricky sounds that others can't easily emulate. Spanishdoes ask you to roll your "R"s once in a while. And the "J" asks for a weird throat-clearingsound, but you can get away with making it sound like a normal "H" (think "San Jose"). Otherwise,unlike German, French, Mandarin, Arabic, etc., it has nothing that a speaker of almost any otherlanguage can't pronounce. Meanwhile, we as native English speakers should be reminded of howdifficult our "th" sound - whether it's the soft "th" in this or the hard "th" inthing - is for nearly every non-English speaker to say correctly. "This thing" will usuallycome out as "dis ting", "zis sing" or any combination thereof.
- Simple plurals. Here's where English really blows. How canyou adequately explain why the plural of house is houses while the pluralof mouse is mice and the plural of moose is moose? And why ischildren the plural of child? To pluralize a noun in Spanish, you simply add an "-s"if the noun ends in a vowel or "-es" if the noun ends in a consonant. The only wacky exception isthat for nouns ending in "Z", you have to change the "Z" to a "C". Big wow. Other than that, therules can't be simpler.
- -ísimo. I end with a personal favorite. Got anadjective? Want to emphasize it? Where we boring English speakers are stuck with overused adverbslike "really," "quite" and "very," Spanish speakers get to add the suffix -ísimo.Something really big? grandísimo. Something very easy? facilísimo. Andthat, mis amigos, is buenísimo.
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