¿Por qué? 101 Questions About Spanish

are notorious among second-language learners, such as confusing ser and estar, saber and conocer, and por and para (Questions 41 and 44), or forgetting the personal a (Question 97) or the a needed with verbs like gustar (Question 93).

Contact with English and French, which use re- to indicate a repeated action, has altered the meaning of Spanish re- from its traditional use as an augmentative. This change can be seen in the two meanings of the verb recalentar: the older ‘to overheat’ and the newer ‘reheat.’ Other

This is a familiar pattern: in general, only the most frequent verbs are able to resist the tendency for irregular forms to become regular over time.

Scientifically speaking, linguists have never been able to find a universally valid cut-off point between dialects and languages on either measure. And

Besides words spelled with double rr, Spanish also trills single r at the beginning of a word, as in real ‘real.’ Single r elsewhere, as in caro ‘expensive,’ is pronounced with a different kind of r: a single rapid, light tap of the tongue tip behind the front teeth. This tap (also called a flap) is close to the American English pronunciation of d

The linguistic picture in Spain before the Roman conquest was one of great diversity—and mystery. At least four different language families were represented. Basque/Aquitanian (see previous question) was spoken in the North. The Afro-Asiatic family was represented by Punic, or Phoenician, a Semitic language of North Africa spoken in Carthaginian se

The Academia’s current spelling guide (RAE 2011) devotes fully sixty-five pages to the topic of accent marks. This is technical reading, but pure pleasure for a grammar glutton. Question

Spanish arrived at its five-vowel set by halving Latin’s set of ten, which included five long vowels and five short. The long vowels were similar in pronunciation to their short counterparts but were held twice as long (Wheelock 2005: xxxvi). Instead of just collapsing long and short vowels, Spanish also merged certain vowels in certain contexts, j

The five letters a–e–i–o–u in the Roman alphabet represent an enormous variety of vowel sounds in different languages. English, for example, uses them to express twelve distinct vowel sounds: those heard in beet, bit, bait, bet, bat, bot, bought, boat, book, boot, and but, plus the unstressed first syllable of baton.