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Because Spanish is a Romance language (which means it evolved from Latin), many of its words are either inherited from Latin or derive from Latin words. Although English is a Germanic language, it, too, incorporates thousands of Latinate words that are related to words in Spanish. [3]
This word ending—thought to be difficult for Spanish speakers to pronounce at the time—evolved in Spanish into a "-te" ending (e.g. axolotl = ajolote). As a rule of thumb, a Spanish word for an animal, plant, food or home appliance widely used in Mexico and ending in "-te" is highly likely to have a Nahuatl origin.
Some Spanish nouns can take a large number of affective suffixes, creating words with subtle differences in meaning or connotation. For instance, chico 'boy' has the derived forms chicarrón, chicazo, chicoco, chicote, chicuelo, chiquete, chiquilín, chiquillo, chiquitico, chiquito, chiquitín and chiquituco, each with a subtle distinction in ...
Spanish is a grammatically inflected language, which means that many words are modified ("marked") in small ways, usually at the end, according to their changing functions. Verbs are marked for tense , aspect , mood , person , and number (resulting in up to fifty conjugated forms per verb).
Spanish adjectives can be broadly divided into two groups: those whose lemma (the base form, the form found in dictionaries) ends in -o, and those whose lemma does not. The former generally inflect for both gender and number; the latter generally inflect just for number. Frío ("cold"), for
Occasionally, this process is extended to pronouns (pouco, a little → pouquinho or poucochinho, a very small amount), adjectives (e.g. bobo → bobinho, meaning respectively "silly" and "a bit silly"; só → sozinho, both meaning "alone" or "lonely"), adverbs (depressa → depressinha, mean "quickly") and even verbs.
To determine which words are the most common, researchers create a database of all the words found in the corpus, and categorise them based on the context in which they are used. The first table lists the 100 most common word forms from the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA), a text corpus compiled by the Real Academia Española (RAE).
Spanish verbs are conjugated in three persons, each having a singular and a plural form. In some varieties of Spanish, such as that of the Río de la Plata Region, a special form of the second person is used. Spanish is a pro-drop language, meaning that subject pronouns are often omitted.