DAY ONE. YO. ALSO RULES OF STRESS AND ACCENTUATION

Mom suggested I write a blog about learning Spanish (perhaps for my parents and others to read!), and I thought it wouldn’t be the stupidest thing in the world to try it.  But I would want to do more than that, since I’m living in Galicia with my Galician spouse and his Galician family and all; I would want to talk about Galician and Portuguese (which I would say exist on a dialect continuum) AND Spanish.  And maybe I’ll throw in other languages for good measure.  Languages don’t exist individually, each in their own private little vacuum.  In English alone there are coup d’états and enchiladas, arpeggios and Gesundheits, lattes and grandes and ventis and even trentas (that’s a lot of coffee!) --- and you see, the list goes on.  French and Spanish and Italian and German and on and on and on...

I want my parents to be able to communicate with Manuel’s parents (Manuel is my spouse for those reading who might not know).  Manu’s parents know bits of English and my parents know bits of Spanish.  I wonder if my parents know even a lick of Galician or Portuguese.  I’ve learned so much, but how to impart what I’ve learned?

I can tell it like a story.  Maybe.

Before I begin... just wanted to give you the first of what’s likely to be many recommendations... I recommend a website called forvo.com where you can look up words and they can be pronounced for you in Spanish.  Also can be done on a site called wordreference.com.  Both sites are much more pleasant to use (in my opinion) with Google Chrome’s ADBLOCK enabled (which I think both Mom and Dad already have, yes?) ---

Anyways.

Where is the best place to begin?

There isn’t one.  But I was thinking it is only logical to begin with yourself.  That’s how my journal entries go, that’s how my stories go.  I very often begin with I.  How do I say I?  Well, it’s funny, cause the Spanish word for I sort of sounds like the colloquial English greeting, YO!  It’s like yo, what’s up, it’s I.  

But the way I pronounce it, it actually sounds like just your average JOE.  Joe, like the name.  I remember in my eighth grade Spanish class the kids would make fun of our teacher often and ruthlessly, and laughed about how the word for ‘I’ sounded like Joe.  What’s funny is remembering the awful teasing has always helped me remember the word.  YO.  JOE.  YO.

In the Portuguese and Galician version of I it’s rather easier to see the departure from Latin (and it’s also, characteristically, not too unlike Spanish); in Galician/Portuguese, we say EU.  But EU isn’t like the European Union (which is la Unión Europea, or the UE, in Spanish); EU is like eu is like the ‘e’ in ‘get’ and the ‘w’ in ‘ew, that’s gross’ ; it’s like EH OO smooshed together, and it comes from EGO as in ‘you’ve got a big ego’, the Latin word for I.  The ‘g’ dropped out of the Latin word because it was too weak to compete and the ‘o’ changed to become more like the ‘e’ in a process I believe may be known as palatization.  If I am remembering correctly in Spanish the degradation went a bit of a different way, and the ‘g’ still dropped out, but they kept the ‘o’, and the ‘e’ changed to an ‘i’ because it was easier to pronounce (for reasons that I believe also have to do with palatization) and then the ‘i’ became like the consonant ‘y’ as in ‘yoda’ so that you have YO sort of like it sounds in English (but with a pure ‘o’, not the crazy lazy dipthong oh-oo we do in English, but a pure O like the kind of O that you sing... ) ...

Ah but then how does a ‘yo’ end up sounding like a JOE (at least in some Spanishes, such as in the Colombian Spanish I learned in eighth grade and, in fact, largely retained in some instances of my speech?) ... well the truth is that the ‘y’ in Spanish has a bunch of different pronunciations.  Like in Argentina, which is where my host mother in Madrid hailed from, the ‘y’ in ‘yo’ is like the ‘s’ in ‘measure’, or the ‘sh’ in ‘bishop’, I kid you not --- The simple consonant ‘y’ gets beefed up, you see, with a stronger consonant with greater frication.  So their ‘yo’ could be pronounced like ‘show’.  Sho, zho, joe, yo.  YO.  So many variations.

In Catalan, which they speak in Catalonia, they actually write their version of ‘yo’, their version of ‘I’, like this: JO, and it’s pronounced with the ‘s’ in ‘measure’, just the way they pronounce ‘yo’ in Argentina.  And now you (at least sort of) know why!  And remember in French je t’aime and ‘je ne sais pas’ and ‘je ne sais quoi’  ?  Well, do you now have some idea of why their ‘je’ which means ‘I’ gets pronounced with that strong ZZZHHHHH sound, like the ‘s’ in ‘measure’?

But like I was saying, I say ‘yo’ more or less like ‘JOE’.  I would say Manuel pronounces it a lot closer to the ‘yo’ as in English’s ‘yo, what’s up?’

So have you gotten it into your head that ‘yo’ means ‘I’?  Now for the ridiculous part, which is that Spanish, as in many other languages (as in even English, in some cases) has a distinct verb form for the first person singular (that ‘I’) than for other persons and numbers.  In English we say ‘I am’ but then ‘she is’ and then ‘we are’ and ‘they will be’ and ‘you all were’, and ‘he was’, right?  The verb changes depending on the person and number, in both English and Romance languages like Spanish, Galician, etc.  This changing of verb forms is called inflection; English verbs inflect for person and number.  I believe in Arabic verbs inflect for person and number AND gender!  And then there are languages with verbs that are barely inflected, or not inflected at all!  Cool, right?  What a beautiful variety, like a rainbow wheel rich in color...

Spanish verbs are more highly inflected than English verbs.  So in English we say ‘I put’ and ‘you put’ and ‘we put’ and then, oh, it’s a little different cause you can say ‘she puts’ but then... well, is there ever any more than PUT or PUTS, or is that it for inflection with that root verb form PUT(S)?  (Answer: nope, that’s it).  In Spanish there is so much more inflection.  PONER and PONGO and PUSE and PUSIÉRAMOS and PONÍAIS and those are all different inflected forms of the same verb!

So in terms of verbs, Spanish is more highly inflected than English, where there are not that many variations to verb forms!  That being said, there are some cases where this ‘I’ form (or ‘yo’ form, as I remember it being referred to in Spanish classes of the past) is actually the same as other verb forms.  

But let’s take the present singular form of regular verbs.  There’s this ‘o’ ending for this verb form, this ‘yo’ form.  And it comes up in Spanish, Galician, and Portuguese, and indeed, in Latin as well, which is hardly surprising.  O ho, YO ho, the pirate’s life for me.  O ho, YO ho.  Hey there, Yo, let’s give you a verb form that ends in ‘o’.  

In Spanish, the dictionary form of verbs (so, as you have probably already guessed, this is the form you will find in the dictionary when looking up the verb) is the infinitive form.  In English, ‘am’ and ‘are’ and ‘were’ and ‘is’ and ‘be’ all come from the same verb, but ‘be’ is the dictionary form, and I would wager if you look up any of the other forms you’ll be directed back to that ‘be’ dictionary form.  That ‘be’ has a sort of implied ‘to’ in front of it ... ‘to be’ is an infinitive.  ‘To eat’ , ‘to dance’ , ‘to drive’ , ‘to meander’ ... infinitives, the lot of them.

In Spanish and Portuguese and Galician, the infinitive is encapsulated in a single word, which ALWAYS ends in ‘r’.  Convenient, eh?

Before we conjugate verbs, a word (okay, more than just one word, but oh well) about stress and pronunciation, which is super important in these languages, as it is in English.

Let me focus on Spanish.  In Spanish, words very often end in vowels.  a, e, i, o, u, these are our vowels (I will get to ‘y’ , which is a bit of a different case [sometimes consonant and sometimes semi-vowel] shortly[ish]).  

SO, in Spanish, If a word ends in a vowel, then the stress falls on the syllable BEFORE the last syllable (or, the penultimate syllable).  ALWAYS, unless there is an accent mark on a vowel in a different syllable.  Enchilada, margarita, taco, mosquito, amiga.  Are these helpful examples?  See how the stress goes on the penultimate syllables and the words all end in vowels and there are therefore no accent marks to be found?  --- Now, some words end in ‘s’, and the same rule applies.  If a word ends in ‘s’, then the stress falls on the penultimate syllable.  ALWAYS, unless there is an accent mark on a vowel in a different syllable.  So... enchiladas, margaritas, tacos, mosquitos, amigas... and so on and so forth. --- And then there are words that end in ‘n’, and with these words, the stress goes on the penultimate syllable of the word (ALWAYS unless there is an accent mark on a vowel in a different syllable, just as with words ending in the letter ‘s’ and words ending in vowels). I am struggling to come up with Spanish words you are already familiar with.  So, some examples, which are words you may not already know, are cantan, resumen, pagan.  If you see a word like ‘amó’ or ‘jamás’ or ‘andén’ , you will now be able to say ‘hey, I know why those words have an accent mark!’  --- Now for another part of this pronunciation-and-stress-themed interruption, where I tell you that in words that end in a consonant (or a semi-vowel) besides ‘n’ or ‘s’ (that is, all the other words), the stress falls on the vowel of the LAST syllable of the word, ALWAYS, unless there is an accent mark on a vowel in a different syllable.  So, matador, amor, actriz, Madrid.  

The five vowels are easy to pronounce. ‘a’ as in ‘car’, ‘e’ as gate, ‘i’ as in ‘neat’, ‘o’ as in ‘boat’, ‘u’ as in ‘root’.  These vowels are just sort of QUITE pure and unadulterated.  So the Spanish word le is not quite like English lay because it’s not lay-ee with that little ‘ee’ bit we put on the end, and the Spanish word lo is not quite like English low because it’s not low-oo with that little ‘oo’ bit on the end.  I think you know what I’m talking about. ‘LAY’ and ‘LOW’ are words that contain diphthongs; ‘le’ and ‘lo’ contain no semi-vowels (or, as I enjoy calling them, ‘tiny pieces of vowel-shrapnel’).

When it comes to forming diphthongs, we put ‘i’ and ‘u’ (what we call the ‘weaker’ vowels) with other vowels (‘a’ or ‘e’ or ‘o’, the ‘stronger’ vowels) and they sort of slide into them.  Camioneta is like ca-myo-NE-ta.  You see that ‘myo’ there?  The ‘i’ slides right into the ‘o’.  And suegra is like SWAY-gra, with the ‘u’ sliding right into the ‘e’.  So you see the ‘myo’ and the ‘SWAY’ are each just one syllable, though you see that they contain multiple vowels.  The word ‘cambio’ is pronounced like ‘CAM-byo’, because the ‘i’ slides right into the ‘o’ and becomes one syllable.  Now and again the weak vowel does not slide right into the strong vowel; when it doesn’t, you need to put an accent mark on the weak vowel.  You know the name María, right?  If you didn’t put the accent mark over the i, you would pronounce the word like ‘MA-rya’.  And that’s just not how you say María, is it? -- If two strong vowels are put together, they (surprise, surprise) do NOT slide into each other.  They use their strength (remember, they’re strong vowels) to remain separate from one another, I guess.  So ‘cae’ is ‘CA-ay’ (CA as in CAR and AY as in SAY, to be absolutely clear) ... it’s a two syllable word made up of a consonant plus two strong vowels, and, seeing as there’s no accent mark to be found, the stress is on the penultimate syllable. --- And what happens when two weak vowels (that’s ‘i’ and ‘u’, just to remind you) get shoved together?  Well, one has to slide into the other, right?  With some words it’s clear which weak vowel slides into the other, and in other words multiple variations are commonly heard.  Believe me, I could go into some complicated explaining (and indeed, I already did in a paragraph I have since chucked into a small corner of a Google doc that no one will ever see).  Suffice it to say that you have to learn the pronunciation for each of these words on a case-by-case basis.

That’s all for today (folks)!  See you tomorrow (or some other day soon!)