Beth Worthy
11/16/2015
Spanish is one of the biggest Romance languages, which originated from a language spoken by the Romans. Despite being closely associated with the Italian and Portuguese languages, Spanish is markedly different from the English language. There are various differences between English and Spanish – making translation a tricky job to do. As a result, translators need to be very careful while translating text from English to Spanish or vice versa. Lets have a close look at the 6 major grammar differences between the Spanish and English languages.
In the English language, an adjective is often placed before the noun, for example, she has bought a red car. However, this is not the case with the Spanish. Adjectives are often placed after the noun in the Spanish language.
In Spanish, there is no one-to-one correspondence when it comes to tense usage. This can lead to incorrect usage of tense while translating in English, often using a simple tense instead of a future tense. Also, Spanish doesn’t have any auxiliary in negative or interrogative sentence structures.
Both English and Spanish follow the same sentence order of subject-verb-object. However, the Spanish language enjoys the flexibility to use stressed words at the end of the sentence.
In the Spanish language, there is no need to use ‘I’, ‘he’ or ‘it’, because the verb tenses alter with the subject. In English, this is not the case. One cannot simply skip the subject in the subject in the sentence formation. For example, ‘went to school yesterday’, alone doesn’t make any sense.
English has three basic types of verbs; the past tense, the past participle, and the infinitive. In Spanish, there are 15 types of each of the verbs, along with the past participle and gerund. And then, within these 15 types, there are 6 specific styles to indicate the speaker or the originator of the action.
In the Spanish language, there is a strong connection between the sound and the spelling of a word, which is not the case with English. Another major difference is the double-letter combinations, which is only three in Spanish; cc, ll and rr. In English, the count is not limited to three.
