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Spanish is capable of expressing such concepts without a special cleft structure thanks to its flexible word order. For example, if we translate a cleft sentence such as "It was Juan who lost the keys", we get Fue Juan el que perdió las llaves. Whereas the English sentence uses a special structure, the Spanish one does not.
Standard Spanish may be seen as a type of roof covering and influencing the various spoken dialects of Spanish. Individual varieties of Spanish can be located in both geographical and social space, with the speech of the most powerful being most similar to the standard roof, while the speech of the least powerful differs the most from the standard.
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. In this way, nouns differ from other Spanish words that show number contrast (i.e., adjectives, determiners, and verbs), which vary in number to agree with nouns. [27]
An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, punctuation, word boundaries, capitalization, hyphenation, and emphasis.. Most national and international languages have an established writing system that has undergone substantial standardization, thus exhibiting less dialect variation than the spoken language.
However, a word like Latin iste had the neuter istud; the former became este and the latter became esto in Spanish. Another sign that Spanish once had a grammatical neuter exists in words that derive from neuter plurals. In Latin, a neuter plural ended in -a, and so these words today in Spanish are interpreted as feminine singulars and take ...
The goal of formal semantics is to show how sentences of a natural language such as English could be translated into a formal logical language, and so would then be amenable to mathematical analysis. Following Russell , it is typical to translate indefinite noun phrases using an existential quantifier , [ 6 ] as in the following simple example ...
Linguistic prescription is a part of a language standardization process. [20] The chief aim of linguistic prescription is to specify socially preferred language forms (either generally, as in Standard English, or in style and register) in a way that is easily taught and learned. [21]
Some words entered Middle English and Early Modern Spanish indirectly and at different times. For example, a Latinate word might enter English by way of Old French, but enter Spanish directly from Latin. Such differences can introduce changes in spelling and meaning. Although most of the cognates have at least one meaning shared by English and ...