Later On

I have spent the day working on Spanish, and I feel I’m a better person for it. Mostly I studied the preterite, forms and meanings. I was able to save a little time—for example, the verbs “to be” (ser) and “to go” (ir) are exactly the same in the preterite. That is, they don’t mean the same, but to save time, Spanish uses the identical words for both forms throughout: first, second, and third persons, singular and plural. The idea is to figure out which one it is from the context.

The problem is, they didn’t take it far enough. Why stop with ser and ir? Why not use the same identical forms for “to drive” and “to cook”, for example? Just tell which is meant from the context…

Also, in Spanish the preterite denotes completed action, and some actions are, by nature, not completed. For example, if you knew some fact yesterday, presumably you know it today as well, so saber (to know, as a fact) doesn’t work so well in the preterite… except that they noticed, and that provided a way to overload that word as well (just as the preterite forms fui, fuiste, fue, etc. are overloaded, meaning both “to be” and “to go”; or the letters “b” and “v” are overloaded: the two are pronounced exactly alike, but each has two different sounds). So saber in its preterite is taken to mean “to find out, learn, discover”—which makes sense: it marks when the knowledge of the fact began.

Conocer means to know, as one knows a person, and again the preterite sense of that meaning—with the requirement that the action be completed in the past—doesn’t make sense, so there’s another opportunity to overload a word: conocer in the preterite means “met”—when knowing the person began.

And there’s another way to overload words—something the Spanish language seems to do a lot: you can use the same word for two totally unrelated meanings by changing the gender of the word. For example, el panda is the iconic bear from China, and la panda is a gang. La calavera means “skull” (or, in Mexico, a taillight), and el calavera means “rake” or “madcap.”

And then there are the feminine nouns that take a masculine definite article in the singular, though not the plural: el agua, las aguas; el ave, las aves. But adjectives for those words use the feminine form: el agua bendita, holy water.

Some of you know lots more Spanish that I ever will, but I’m finding it interesting and like to share what I’ve learned with those even more ignorant of Spanish than I.