Guide To The Spanish Language
An introduction to Spanish without the grammar - A new and fresh perspective with some interesting items on
language and the similarities between Spanish and English
Learning Spanish - Cognates - Do you know what a cognate is?
The dictionary definition says a cognate is a word related by descent from the same ancestral language or related by derivation. Latin was the formal
language of the Roman Empire and influenced many European languages. Spanish is a language with roots in Latin as is French, Italian, Portuguese and
Romanian (the Romance languages). German and Swedish is also not unaffected by the language of the Romans. In English 60% of words are
derived either directly or indirectly from Latin.
Spanish originated in northern Spain as a dialect of Latin. As discussed previously language is created on the streets. Local usage in northern Spain
corrupted the Latin brought by the Romans and blended it with the indigenous language of the time, the result was Castilian Spanish. A similar thing
happened in England. The end result is that both Spanish and English have a large number of words derived from the same Latin root, which is great news
because many of these words are easily recognizable and very close relatives. For example if I was to ask you to guess at what the English
meaning is of the Spanish word “indigestiòn” or the Spanish word “construcciòn” or what about “anticipaciòn”, you would be right, brilliant you
see Spanish is easy, well some of it anyway. Notice the little mark over the letter ó this is a great way to indicate a particular way of
pronunciation.
Now what if I tell you that most English words that end in ity such as opportunity or hospitality can be changed into the Spanish equivalent by
simply changing the last two letters from ty to dad.
For example: opportunity becomes opportunidad and hospitality becomes
hospitalidad. Fantastic you are beginning to learn Spanish. These are just some examples of the many thousands of words that are very closely related
in Spanish and English and the kind of shortcuts available to help us learn Spanish. I can provide a list of words that are so similar to English that you
will be able to guess their translation without any teacher being involved, such
words as accident or abandonar, eliminar, resultar, transportar etc. There are actually some 25,000 such examples you can even buy a book that gives you
all 25,000 English Spanish cognates.
If we consider that we need to be familiar with approximately 7,000 useful words to be able to converse well in any language you can see that for the
English person learning Spanish we do have a head start over someone from say China or Arabia or indeed any other non Latin based language country.
Of course their will be many other words that are uniquely Spanish and will have to be learned parrot fashion. I’m afraid we just cannot escape the fact
that to learn a language we will have to do a lot of work over a long period of time but I offer a different perspective and some useful shortcuts in Spanish
that I hope will provide some encouragement.
The first step is to get things in perspective and understand some interesting aspects of language. Then once we have a good perspective we can begin to
learn some useful Spanish words and build our vocabulary. We need to have a basic vocabulary as this is a fundamental ingredient of language. Once we
have an understanding of a worthwhile number of Spanish words we can then begin to look at how these words should be put together to form sentences
and phrases. Without getting into the grammatical theory we can learn useful phrases and start using them in practice.
