Spanish MT Seminar Semester A, 14/15 Shahar Avital
Spanish -­‐ Facts
•  Today’s Spanish is derived from a dialect of spoken La?n. •  Influences: Basque, Arabic. •  Evolved aIer the fall of the Western Roman Empire. •  hLp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Spanish_language#mediaviewer/
File:Linguis?c_map_Southwestern_Europe.gif •  A member of the Romanian languages (along with Portuguese, French, Italian and more), in the Indo-­‐European family of languages. •  Approximately 470 million people speak Spanish as a na?ve language •  Second only to Mandarin. Spanish Different Dialects Around The World
Spanish is a na?onal language in about 43 countries.
Spanish Alphabet and Phonology
•  ch – as in English.
•  j – somewhere between English ‘h’ and Hebrew ‘‫ ‘ח‬ •  ll – stressed y. •  “cas?lla” •  ñ – n + y. •  "niño" •  g – if followed by e or i it pronounced as j
Phonology -­‐ Accents
•  For a Spanish word, the stress falls: •  On the penul?mate syllable in words ending in a vowel, n or s (e.g. como eat, gafas glasses). •  On the last syllable in words ending in a consonant other than n or s (e.g. comer to eat, pared wall). •  Excep?ons to either rule are marked with a wriLen accent: comí ate, árbol tree. •  A wriLen accent is also used on such pairs of vowels as aí, aú, to show that the í or ú cons?tutes a separate syllable. So caigo I fall has two syllables, with the stress on cai, but caído fallen has three syllables. Verbs And Tenses
Verbs
•  Spanish verbs can change in three places at once: the vowel in the stem (Stem Changes), the consonant at the end of the stem (Spelling Changes), and the ending: •  s-­‐e-­‐gu-­‐ir •  s-­‐i-­‐g-­‐-­‐o •  s-­‐e-­‐gu-­‐imos •  s-­‐i-­‐g-­‐-­‐amos •  s-­‐i-­‐gu-­‐ió Nouns
•  Nouns have two forms: singular and plural. •  Add ‘s’ to nouns that end with a vowel. •  Add ‘es’ to nouns that end with a consonant. •  All nouns are either masculine or feminine. •  Usually adjec?ves appear aIer the noun they modify. •  But oIen interchangeable with them. •  Adj. also agree with what they refer to in terms of both number and gender. Word Order
Spanish allows much flexibility. •  SVO: •  Roberto compró el libro.(Roberto bought the book.) •  SOV: •  Roberto lo compró. (“Roberto it brought”) •  OVS: •  El libro lo escribió Juan. (“the book wrote juan”) Tools and Research
•  Google translate. •  Text to speech •  Exploring Spanish-­‐morphology effects on Chinese–Spanish SMT hLp://www.mt-­‐archive.info/MATMT-­‐2008-­‐Banchs.pdf •  Spanish is morphological rich. •  Chinese is morphological poor. •  Chinese à Morphology Reduced Spanish à Spanish References
•  hLp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Spanish_language •  hLp://www.mt-­‐archive.info/MATMT-­‐2008-­‐Banchs.pdf •  hLp://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W08-­‐0320 •  hLp://spanish.about.com/od/sentencestructure/a/word-­‐order-­‐in-­‐
spanish.htm •  hLp://spanish.about.com/od/historyofspanish/a/
10_facts_about_spanish.htm •  hLp://www.derek.co.uk/ra?onal-­‐language-­‐learning/spanish-­‐
morphology.htm •  hLp://www.studyspanish.com/pronuncia?on/alphabet.html