La Lengua Loca

A few random thoughts of various aspects of Spanish I find interesting:

In Spanish, one can refer to a diminutive version of an object by tacking -ito to the end of a noun. For example, car is coche, but a tiny car is a cochito. Or a regular size dog is a perro and a tiny annoying yippy dog or a puppy is a perrito. This a neat little trick that I don’t think exists in English. Although, I suppose the Mariners of yesteryear came close with those hideous player nicknames (Boonie, Cammy, Ichi).

One thing that continues to drive me batty is the fact that every noun has a gender associated with it. For example, beer (cerveza) is feminine and wine (vino) is masculine. The gender of the noun affects the (in)definite article you use as well as the adjectives. For example, the “the beer” is “la cerverza” and “the wine” is “el vino”. As a general rule of thumb, nouns that end in “a” are feminine and nouns that end in “o” are masculine”. Normally, I find this to be a huge pain in the ass but the one place where it really comes in handy is with family members. Aunt is “tia” and uncle is “tio”. Brother is “hermano” and sister is “hermana”. Simple to remember and rather elegant I think. Compare this English where the words for these different family members look nothing alike.

But since languages evolve organically and all that jazz, there are of course two separate words for mother (madre) and father (padre). Go figure.