“Why Can’t Spanish Be More Like English?”

It was Sunday night, that notorious time when a student realizes that certain homework requirements have not been met. Thus, my disgruntled teenager, Nick, plopped himself down on the couch so I could quiz him on the Spanish past tense verbs. At that moment, Nick was pretty much “disgusted” (his word) with the whole language: “There’s like 25 ways to say one word,” he complained. Spanish verb forms, like the Latin ones they grew from, give each “person” (I, you, he, etc.) a different ending. English, on the other hand, simplified the whole thing long ago.

Compare:
To Speak (past tense)
I spoke
You spoke
He/she/it spoke
We spoke
They spoke

Not bad! As long as a person remembers that the past tense is “spoke” and not, say, “speaked,” getting it right is a sure thing. In Spanish, it’s a different case:

Hablar (To Speak, past tense)
(I) Yo hable
(You – familiar) Tu hablaste
(You – formal) Usted hablo
(He/she – there is no “it”) El/ella hablo
(We) Nosotros hablamos
(You, familiar & plural) Vosotros hablasteis
(You, formal & plural) Ustedes hablaron
(They, masculine & feminine) Ellos/ellas hablaron
Even if your eyes just skim over that last part, it’s clear at a glance that English takes home the Simplicity Prize.

Not that this simplicity came overnight: it took every bit of 300 years, and then some, to change the mind-boggling complexities of Old English grammar into the comparatively streamlined Modern English grammar. Old English was a West Germanic dialect spoken from roughly 400-1100 A.D. and had all the personal pronouns that Spanish still has, masculine and feminine nouns, and – most difficult of all -- five fully inflected grammatical cases; (if you don’t know what that means, you probably don’t want to know, at least right now.)

Suffice it to say, without the benefit of Old English as Second Language lessons, it was a hard language for foreigners to master. And for a good long while, England was a veritable polyglot nation. Norman French (native tongue of William the Conqueror, who sailed from Normandy, France and conquered England in 1066) was the language of the nobility, government and literature, and later science and commerce; meanwhile, Latin was the language of the Church. At the same time, there were parts of England where commoners still spoke the Danish or Norwegian from their Viking forbears. And each of the 25 English counties, from Berkshire to Yorkshire, had its own local Old English dialect as well.

All this multiculturalism took a toll on good ol’ Old English and got what I call the big Linguistic Shakedown. Basically, people crossing boundaries and language borders to raid, trade, marry or otherwise communicate started speaking the most basic English in order to be understood. Sort of like tourists do when they go to another country and can’t speak the local language. In time, the simplifications simply became standard. Just one “you”; no more case endings, no more adjectives that have to modify their nouns, and really easy declensions (I do, you do, etc), and adding “s” to make nouns plural – though some Old English irregular plurals have hung on – like men, women and children.

Of course, understanding why English grammar is comparatively easy compared to Spanish does not do Nick any good. Even if I tell him that Spanish is a dialect of Latin and took out some of the harder parts of that Mother Tongue, he is not going to feel any better. Spanish never got the Linguistic Shakedown that English did because it was adopted by the King of Castile, in Spain, and then established as the principal language of government and trade; later, explorers and conquistadors took Spanish overseas – to Latin America and other places, without any problem. It’s now one of the most widely spoken (close to 400 million native speakers worldwide) and widely studied languages in the world.

So … statistically, the chances that Nick will eventually master those past tense verbs are pretty good. But for now, Nick sees little future with the past.