Spanish Grammar
Spanish Grammar is one of the toughest issues when learning a foreigner language because of complexity in all sense. In this short article EPA! Spanish School in Panama describes four relevant aspects of Spanish Language Grammar highlighting its use and changes throughout history.
Forms of address
The use of usted and ustedes as a polite form of address is universal. However, there are variations in informal address. Ustedes replaces vosotros in much of Andalusia, the Canary Islands and Latin America, except in the liturgical or poetic of styles. In some parts of Andalusia, the pronoun ustedes is used with the standard vosotros endings.
Depending on the region, Latin Americans may also replace the singular tú with usted or vos. The choice of pronoun is a tricky issue and can even vary from village to village. Travellers are often advised to play it safe and call everyone usted.
A feature of the speech of the Dominican Republic and other areas where syllable-final /s/ is completely silent is that there is no audible difference between the second and third person singular form of the verb. This leads to redundant pronoun use, for example, the tagging on of ¿tú ves? (pronounced tuvé) to the ends of sentences, where other speakers would say ¿ves?.
Another key point of Spanish grammar is Voseo, not used in Panama city but commonly incorporated in other provinces's conversation. Let's take a look at this Spanish grammar.
Voseo
Vos was used in medieval Castilian as a polite form, like the French vous and the Italian voi, and it used the same forms as vosotros. This gave three levels of formality:
Whereas vos was lost in standard Spanish grammar and verbal use, some dialects lost tú, and began using vos as the informal pronoun. The exact connotations of this practice, called voseo, depend on the exact dialect. In most places, it is associated with low socio-economic levels. In Argentina, however, it is used by everyone and is fully accepted. Argentinian voseo uses the pronoun vos for tú, but maintains te as an object pronoun and tu and tuyo as possessives.
In Argentina's Spanish grammar, verbs corresponding to vos in the present indicative (roughly equivalent to the English simple present), are formed from the second person plural (the form for vosotros). If the second person plural ends in áis or éis, the form for vos drops the i:
Similarly the verb ser (to be) has:
If the second person plural ends in -ís (with an accent on the í), then the form for vos is identical:
In the imperative, the form for vos is also derived from the second person plural. The latter ends always in -d. So for the form for vos this d is removed, and if the verb has more than one syllable, an accent is added to the last vowel:
The only exception to these rules is in the verb ir (to go), which does not have an imperative form for vos and uses the analogous form of the verb andar, which has a similar meaning, and is regular:
In the present subjunctive, the same rules as for the present indicative apply, though these forms coexist in Argentina with those for the pronoun tú:
OR
Other tenses always have the same form for vos as for tú.
Outside Argentina, other combinations are possible. For instance, Chileans may use standard vosotros endings for vos.
Vosotros imperative: -ar for -ad
Colloquially, the infinitive is used instead of the normative imperative for vosotros. This is not accepted in the normative language.
non-normative -s on tú form
A form used for centuries but never accepted normatively has an -s ending in the second person singular of the preterite or simple past. For example, lo hicistes instead of the normative lo hiciste;hablastes tú for hablaste tú. This is the only instance in which the tú form does not end in an -s in the normative language.
Ladino has gone further with hablates.
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