Amidst the plethora of similarities between French and Spanish that we discover each day, we noticed a point of Spanish grammar that paralleled, interestingly enough, Japanese:

In English, we have only the words "this" and "that" to use when pointing to objects. In French, we mostly use "ca" as a pointing word.

In Spanish, there are three words!
1. For an object close to the speaker, one points and says "este/a".
2. For an object away from the speaker and close to the listener, the speaker points and says "ese/a".
3. Finally, for objects far away from both the speaker and listener, one says "aquel/a"

In Japanese, there is also this 3-way differentiation, using kore, sore and are.

Wow!



This entry was posted on 1/02/2009 08:15:00 AM and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

1 comments:

    Kered said...

    Ahah yes that's true!
    Congratulations, I can't believe your mastered Spanish in two days! :p

  1. ... on January 2, 2009 at 10:44 AM