Spanish: verbal morphology and phonology

[kite_head]

1. What makes the nosotros form so special? For example, in the imperfect, it always has an accent. There are also the so-called "boot verbs" because the nosotros form is, well, different (i.e. it does not observe stem changes), and by excluding it, the other 5 forms form, well,a boot. How did this form evolve to be so unique

Comments

[tisoi]

1. It has to do with the stress. You get "ue" and "ie" in stressed syllables, while "o" and "e" in unstressed ones. So that's wh you get podemos and tenemos instead of *puedemos and *tienemos. Now as to why the stress falls in a different place? Off hand, I think it has to do with the length of the word and that heavy final syllable. I think you would have to go Latin for that answer. Since the first person plural morpheme is more or less the same (-mus).

2. I don't think it's adding -te, but it's adding -aste to habl-. I am not sure how you would want that to be elaborated on. Again, look at other Romance languages and Latin. :-)

3. I went through a handful of Spanish teachers, none of them taught the vosotros forms. I had to learn it on my own.

4. It's not an error. It's dialectal.

With dijieron - I want to say something based in phonetics. The position of /i/ and /x/ [ç] may motivate palatalization before /e

[emperor_spock]

In addition to (1): Castillian /ue/ and /ie/ appeared in place of Latin short /o/ and /e/ in stressed syllables (with some exceptions, like before /j/ the monophthong persists - 'hoy' instead of 'huey'). That's the reason why 1.p and 2.p plural present tense forms don't have the diphthong - say, for 'tener' (l. 'tenēre') these forms were 'tenēmus' and 'tenētis' with word stress on the penultimate syllable: the short /e/ was unstressed and didn't change. On the other hand, the 2.p. singular present form was 'tenēs', which, too, had the penultimate stress - this time on the short /e/, and that's why we see it changed into /ie/ in 'tienes'.

[draculas_bride]

Concerning question 3, I feel like in a good portion of the US vosotros is rarely taught in schools

[shanrina]

I took two semesters of Spanish in college, and while the professors would usually mention the vosotros form and it would show up in their conjugation tables in a new tense, it would never show up on any tests or quizzes and they said outright that we would never be expected to use it. For the most part, they were teaching us Latin American Spanish because that's what we would need.

I'm not sure exactly what you want to investigate regarding salmon and almond, but I'm an ESL teacher who works almost exclusively with native Spanish speakers. For many of my students it seems like their first instinct is to pronounce every single letter in a word (e.g., comfortable is pronounced com-for-ta-bull instead of the more common kumf-ter-bull, and so on). So if the people you're hearing pronounce the l's are native Spanish speakers, that may be at least part of the reason why you're hearing them pronounce the l. I don't think this would apply if they're not native Spanish speakers or if they were raised bilingual, though.

[trccnts]

For the verbs I recommend you this link: http://www.verbolog.com/conjuga.htm

3.- Maybe "vosotros" is not taught because is mainly used in Spain and I guess in the States is more common to learn Latin American varieties of spanish.

4.- As tisoi said it's dialectal but it's considered incorrect and usually used by poor literate people.

[helenadax]

"Vosotros" is used in Spain, although "ustedes" is used in Andalucia and Canarias. Of course, if you're talking to a group of people and you want to be polite, you use "ustedes" anyway.