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Classical Latin, and the Vulgar Latin from which Romance languages such as Spanish are descended, had only two second-person pronouns – the singular tu and the plural vos. Starting in the early Middle Ages, however, languages such as French and Spanish began to attach honorary significance to these pronouns beyond literal number. Plural ...
Spanish has two grammatical numbers: singular and plural. [27] The singular form is the lemma, and the plural is the marked form. [28] Whether a noun is singular or plural generally depends on the referent of the noun, with singular nouns typically referring to one being and plural nouns to multiple.
Spanish pronouns in some ways work quite differently from their English counterparts. Subject pronouns are often omitted, and object pronouns come in clitic and non-clitic forms. When used as clitics, object pronouns can appear as proclitics that come before the verb or as enclitics attached to the end of the verb in different linguistic ...
In Spanish, the same is true of nuestro/nuestra ("our") and vuestro/vuestra ("your" [plural]), but for all other possessives, the pronoun has a longer form that agrees with the gender of the possessed item, while the adjective has a shorter form that does not change for gender. The possessive adjectives are normally preceded by a definite ...
Spanish is a pro-drop language with respect to subject pronouns, and, like many European languages, Spanish makes a T-V distinction in second person pronouns that has no equivalent in modern English. Object pronouns can be both clitic and non-clitic, with non-clitic forms carrying greater emphasis.
In Spanish, adjectives agree with what they refer to in terms of both plurality (singular/plural) and grammatical gender (masculine/feminine). For example, taza (cup) is feminine, so "the red cup" is la taza roj a , but vaso (glass) is masculine, so "the red glass" is el vaso roj o .
In the second-person plural, modern Spanish speakers in most of Spain employ vosotros (masculine) and vosotras (feminine) informally and (as the third-person plural) ustedes to express respect. In western Andalusia, ustedes is used in both contexts, but its verbs are conjugated in the second-person plural.
In Standard European Spanish the plural of tú is vosotros and the plural of usted is ustedes. In Hispanic America vosotros is not used, and the plural of both tú and usted is ustedes. This means that speaking to a group of friends a Spaniard will use vosotros, while a Latin American Spanish speaker will use ustedes.