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Spanish, also referred to as Castilian to differentiate it from other languages spoken in Spain, is an Indo-European language of the Italic branch. [1] Belonging to the Romance family , it is a daughter language of Latin , evolving from its popular register that used to be spoken on the Iberian Peninsula . [ 2 ]
In Spanish, for instance, subject pronouns do not need to be explicitly present, but in French, its close relative, they are obligatory. The Spanish equivalent to the French je suis (I am) can be simply soy (lit. "am"). The pronoun yo (I) in the explicit form yo soy is used only for emphasis or to clear ambiguity in complex texts.
The modern Spanish verb paradigm (conjugation) has 16 distinct complete [1] forms (tenses), i.e. sets of forms for each combination of tense, mood and aspect, plus one incomplete [2] tense (the imperative), as well as three non-temporal forms (the infinitive, gerund, and past participle). Two of the tenses, namely both subjunctive futures, are ...
The Spanish conjunctions y ('and') and o ('or') alter their form in both spoken and written language to e and u respectively when followed by an identical vowel sound. Thus, padre e hijo ('father and son'), Fernando e Isabel ('Ferdinand and Isabella'), sujeto u objeto ('subject or object'), vertical u horizontal ('vertical or horizontal').
The pronouns yo, tú, vos, [1] él, nosotros, vosotros [2] and ellos are used to symbolise the three persons and two numbers. Note, however, that Spanish is a pro-drop language, and so it is the norm to omit subject pronouns when not needed for contrast or emphasis. The subject, if specified, can easily be something other than these pronouns.
The Spanish language is written using the Spanish alphabet, which is the ISO Latin script with one additional letter, eñe ñ , for a total of 27 letters. [1] Although the letters k and w are part of the alphabet, they appear only in loanwords such as karate, kilo, waterpolo and wolframio (tungsten or wolfram) and in sensational spellings: okupa, bakalao.
A conjunction may be placed at the beginning of a sentence, [1] but some superstition about the practice persists. [2] The definition may be extended to idiomatic phrases that behave as a unit and perform the same function, e.g. "as well as", "provided that".
In linguistics, a disjunct is a type of adverbial adjunct that expresses information that is not considered essential to the sentence it appears in, but which is considered to be the speaker's or writer's attitude towards, or descriptive statement of, the propositional content of the sentence, "expressing, for example, the speaker's degree of truthfulness or his manner of speaking."