ELEMENTS OF SPANISH GRAMMAR PRELIMINARY REMARKS 1. THERE are in Spanish nine parts of speech; namely, the noun, adjective, pronoun, verb, participle, adverb, preposition, conjunction, and interjection. 2. The first five of these parts of speech are capable of various degrees of inflection; that is, certain changes take place in their structure and termination to express number, gender, case, person, mode, or tense. The rest are invariable. 3. Although, strictly speaking, cases are wanting in Spanish, save in the personal pronouns, their technical names are sometimes used for exactness and conciseness of statement. The following table will explain: The use of these cases will be illustrated in treating of the different parts of speech. THE ARTICLES 4. There are two articles-the definite, el, the, and the indefinite, un, a, an. They agree with the noun which they qualify in gender, number, and case, and are thus inflected: D. Á un, á una, to, at a, an, Á unos, á unas, to, at some, one. A. Un, una, a, an. Unos, unas, certain. a few, some, certain. 5. Del, of the, and al, to the, are contracted from de el and á el, respectively. 6. In modern Spanish the uncontracted forms are used only when el belongs to a quoted epithet, title, or heading: Un capítulo de "El Escándalo." A chapter from "The Escándalo." 7. El is now universally employed before feminine nouns in the singular beginning with an accented a, ha : 8. The indefinite article is often used in the same way: Un ave, for una ave. Un águila, for una águila. This, however, is a questionable usage. 9. While, properly speaking, the indefinite article has no plural, the forms unos and unas are used to express the partitive sense of a substantive: Él tiene unos caballos muy altos. He has some very tall horses. 10. So also unos and unas are employed in the indefinite sense |