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Like French and other languages with the T-V distinction, modern Spanish has a distinction in its second-person pronouns that has no equivalent in modern English. The most basic is the difference between tú ( vos in areas with voseo ) and usted : tú or vos is the "familiar" form, and usted , derived from the third-person form "your grace ...
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 ...
Note that the term vosotros is a combined form of vos otros (meaning literally 'ye/you others'), while the term nosotros comes from nos otros ("we/us others"). In the first half of the 19th century, the use of vos was as prevalent in Chile as it was in Argentina.
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.
Ustedes replaces vosotros in part of Andalusia, the Canary Islands, and Latin America, except in the liturgical or poetic of styles. In some parts of Andalusia, the pronoun ustedes is used with the standard vosotros endings. Depending on the region, Latin Americans may also replace the singular tú with usted or vos. The choice of pronoun is a ...
The infinitive is generally the form found in dictionaries. It corresponds to the English "base-form" or "dictionary form" and is usually indicated in English by "to _____" ("to sing," "to write," etc.). The ending of the infinitive is the basis of the names given in English to the three classes of Spanish verbs:
Until the mid-16th century, the short subject forms nos, vos 'we, you' were still found alongside the expanded forms nosotros, vosotros in writing. [34] The shorter form vos is used in Judaeo-Spanish, alongside the expanded vosotros, and the use of non-deferential, singular vos continues in much of Latin America, where it has become known as voseo.
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.