Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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]
Get AOL Mail for FREE! Manage your email like never before with travel, photo & document views. Personalize your inbox with themes & tabs. You've Got Mail!
In the 16th century, as the Spanish colonization of the Americas was beginning, the phoneme now represented by the letter j had begun to change its place of articulation from palato-alveolar [ʃ] to palatal [ç] and to velar [x], like German ch in Bach (see History of Spanish and Old Spanish language).
Unstressed pronouns in Old Spanish were governed by rules different from those in modern Spanish. [1] The old rules were more determined by syntax than by morphology: [2] the pronoun followed the verb, except when the verb was preceded (in the same clause) by a stressed word, such as a noun, adverb, or stressed pronoun. [1]
From standard Spanish acicalado bembé a big party. [3] [6] bichote Important person. From English big shot. [7] birras Beer. [3] bochinche gossip [8] boricua The name given to Puerto Rico people by Puerto Ricans. [3] bregar To work on a task, to do something with effort and dedication. [9] broki brother or friend. [5] cafre a lowlife.
Documented Nahuatl words in the Spanish language (mostly as spoken in Mexico and Mesoamerica), also called Nahuatlismos include an extensive list of words that represent (i) animals, (ii) plants, fruit and vegetables, (iii) foods and beverages, and (iv) domestic appliances. Many of these words end with the absolutive suffix "-tl" in Nahuatl.
While the majority of lexical differences between Spanish and Portuguese come from the influence of the Arabic language on Spanish vocabulary, [2] [3] most of the similarities and cognate words in the two languages have their origin in Latin, [4] but several of these cognates differ, to a greater or lesser extent, in meaning.
[2] [3] [5] Isleño Spanish merges the phonemes /θ/ and /s/ into the single phoneme /s/, a phenomenon known as seseo. [2] [5] [19] At least until the mid twentieth century, Isleño Spanish speakers made a distinction between /ʎ/ and /ʝ/, which is still typical of rural speech in the Canaries, but later studies have suggested instability in ...