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| Lección Catorce (14) | |
| REVISION AND NOTES | |
| 1 The inversion is not absolutely necessary, but it is
in the spirit of the language, and you'll see that, by constant practice, one learns to use it very naturally. Moreover it often indicates shades of meaning, giving greater strength to a word placed at the beginning of a sentence. Spanish is a very supple language, of much less rigid construction than English. |
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| 2 With an infinitive, the object pronoun becomes joined
to the verb. Thus we have : (I) shall buy it : lo compraré. But with the infinitive : I can buy it : puedo comprarlo. - A little more difficult : He has told me so [it] : Me lo ha dicho. He cannot tell me so: No puede decírmelo (The indirect object first, and an accent on the verb to avoid the shifting of the stressed syllable.) We shall see later that it is the same with the imperative and present participle. |
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3 The diphthongs. - There are 3 " strong " vowels, a, o, e, which can't
unite into one syllable. The diphthongs, i. e., the union of 2 vowels into one syllable, are formed with a " strong " vowel (a, o, e) and a " weak " vowel (u, i, y), or with two weak ones. In the former case, the strong vowel is sounded louder, unless an accent indicates the contrary. Ex. : yo doy, yo voy, I give, I go, or again : el baile, the ball; el viaje, the travel, journey; but el día, the day; yo tenía, I had. With two weak vowels, it is the second which dominates: muy, very; la viuda, the widow. Two strong vowels never unite; thus veo, creo, I see, I think are 2 syllable words. |
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| 4 The infinitive is preceded by a after a verb of
motion : I go to buy a book : voy a comprar un libro. - He will come, to tell me so [it] : vendrá a decírmelo. In the other cases there is no fixed rule for the preposition. |
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| 5 It is three o'clock : son las tres. It is a quarter past two : son las dos y cuarto. - It is a quarter to six : son las seis menos cuarto. Five to : menos cinco (= minus five). It is ten past three : son las tres y diez. For one o'clock, the singular ; Es la una. It is half past twelve : son las doce y media. If it is midnight, one adds : de la noche, of the night. At noon, at midnight are : a mediodía, a media noche. |
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| 6. Eleventh is : undécimo; twelfth : duodécimo; thirteenth: décimo tercero; fourteenth : décimo cuarto, etc... But in practice from eleven, ordinal numbers are used : once, doce, etc... Thus : El siglo décimo : the tenth century, but : el siglo quince ' the fifteenth [fifteen] century; el siglo veinte : the century 20... So for kings : Charles V : Carlos Quinto (fifth) ; but Alfonso Trece, Alfonso thirteen, and not thirteenth, that would be Décimo Tercero, which is really too long to say. |
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7 Do you pronounce the jota (Hota), i. e, the j, correctly?
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