If you expect any human language to be logical and internally consistent, or just generally to make sense 100% of the time, well, I’m torn between extending you my sincerest sympathies, and offering to sell you a bridge in San Francisco.
I didn’t even make it to the second day of Spanish class before the language presented me with a situation that made me think “that’s exactly backwards of what logic would dictate”. Yesterday in class (with our delightful substitute Ana, as Rafael was flying to Spain to visit family), we learned some demonstrative pronouns, the equivalents of “this” in English.
Of course, as Spanish is a Romance language, these pronouns have to be modified for gender (whether grammatical or personal) and number. So as not to give away the ending, I’ll tell you that the root of all of these variants was “est-”. First we practiced by identifying people such as Jorge Mario Bergoglio (aka Pope Francis) and Penélope Cruz, which pulled in the vocabulary points of nouns for professions and adjectives for nationalities and regions, all appropriately declined for gender and number.
Then Ana introduced us to the neutral variant, which is used for identifying places and objects. None of us recognized the picture of the Atacama Desert in South America, but had better luck with pictures of La Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona, Constitution Square in Mexico City, and Easter Island by its obvious moai.
(Dearest readers! I had no idea the aforementioned plaza is known as the Zócalo! I knew J. Michael Straczynski had taken the name of the market area on Babylon 5 from some notable landmark on earth, but that one was new to me! I was hoping its etymology was from a Mayan language, but alas, no. It’s apparently from the Latin word for “slipper”, and has a bunch of architecture meanings as well.)
Now, if you’ve learned a bit of Spanish yourself, you may recall that most nouns ending in “-o” are masculine with most adjectives adjusted accordingly, with “-a” as the feminine variant. Furthermore, if you are talking about a group of men (or a group of people of mixed genders with even one man in it, *cough* patriarchy *cough*), the third person plural pronoun is “ellos”, and a group of women is “ellas”. If you read my blog post about gender neutral/inclusive language in Spanish, you will recall that “-e” is a common ending in adjectives that don’t need to be adjusted for grammatical or personal gender (e.g., “él es canadiense” vs. “ella es canadiense”, “he is Canadian” vs. “she is Canadian”), and thus many non-binary people, myself included, use it as their preferred adjectival ending, with corresponding pronoun “elle”.
So, all this said, you would expect the demonstrative pronoun to shake out like this, right?
Nope. (I hope you saw that coming; I’ve been pretty heavy-handed with my foreshadowing.)
These are the demonstrative pronouns for people:
And the demonstrative pronoun for places and objects? ESTO. And does it vary for plurality? Nope.
Esto es La Ciudad de México.
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What do I mean by “because language”? Language is a human endeavor, shaped by times and distances, and disparate minds and population groups, and as a result, it’s never 100% logical or 100% internally consistent. Hell, you’re lucky you get better than 50%. Most of the time, it’s less. Language doesn’t do rules without exceptions; language’s response to “but what about the code?” is to reply “they’re more like guidelines, you see”. Language can be beautiful, profound, and strike awe deep into your heart at one moment, and make you so frustrated and enraged that you want to pull your hair out the next.
(Okay, I wanted to include a video of a commercial from my childhood that claimed you could “learn to speak Spanish by spelling ‘socks’, S-O-C-K-S”, but YouTube isn’t coming through for me.)
Images from Wikimedia, used by Creative Commons license CC BY-SA 3.0
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