Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
If the stress is changed to say this is her car (listen ⓘ), the emphasis is on showing what object belongs to a specific person. In Spanish, stress is almost always changed by reordering the words. Using the same example, este coche es suyo emphasises the owner, and éste es su coche emphasises the object.
The Spanish and Portuguese termination -o usually denotes the masculine, and is normally changed to feminine by dropping the -o and adding -a. The plural forms are usually -os and -as respectively. Adjectives ending in -ish can be used as collective demonyms (e.g. "the English", "the Cornish").
The forms erís for 'you are', and habís and hai for 'you have' are also found in Chilean Spanish. [16] In the case of the ending -ís (such as in comís, podís, vivís, erís, venís), the final -s is pronounced like any other final /s/ in Chilean Spanish. It is most often pronounced as an aspiration similar to the 'h' sound in English.
The explanation is that Spanish has lexically contrastive stress, as evidenced by the minimal pairs like topo (' mole ') and topó (' [he/she/it] met '), while in French, stress does not convey lexical information and there is no equivalent of stress minimal pairs as in Spanish. An important case of stress "deafness" relates to Persian. [16]
Stress is very important in Papiamento. Many words have a very different meaning when a different stress is used: When both syllables are equally stressed, kome, it means "to eat". When the first syllable is stressed, kome, it means "eat!" (imperative). However, kom'é (short for kome é) means "eat it!"
Some of these words are used in most, or all, Spanish-speaking countries, like chocolate and aguacate ("avocado"). For a more complete list, see List of Spanish words of Nahuatl origin. Certain words that are ubiquitous in Nicaraguan Spanish may not be immediately recognizable to non-Nicaraguans: ahuevado: (adj.) It means to be worried, .
In all these countries, Latin American Spanish is the vernacular language of the majority of the population, giving Spanish the most native speakers of any Romance language. In Africa it is one of the official languages of Equatorial Guinea. Spanish was one of the official languages in the Philippines in Southeast Asia until 1973.
In other Spanish-speaking countries, similar games add other syllables instead of p+vowel. There are variants that use f instead of p ; this is the case, for example, in Italian , where the game is called alfabeto farfallino , meaning "butterfly alphabet", because many modified words sound like farfalla (i.e., "butterfly").