Grammar
Galician allows pronominal clitics to be attached to indicative and subjunctive forms, as does Portuguese, unlike modern Spanish. After many centuries of close contact between the two languages, Galician has also adopted many loan words from Spanish, and some calques of Spanish syntax.
Galician usually makes the difference according to gender and categorizes words as masculine "o rapaz" (the little boy) or feminine "a rapaza" (the little girl). This difference is present in the articles "o / a / os/ as" (the), nouns "o can / a cadela" (the dog / the bitch), pronouns "el / ela", (he / she) and adjectives "bonitiño / bonitiña" (pretty, beautiful) There is also a neutre set of demostrative pronouns "isto, iso, aquilo" (this / that). The most typical ending for masculine words is -o, whereas the most typical ending for feminine is -a "o prato / a tixola" (the plate / the frying pan). The difference in the grammatical gender of a word may correspond to a real gender difference in the physical world "xuicioso / xuiciosa" (sensible); the former adjective will qualify a male, and the latter, a female. However, there is no particular reason for objects to be adscribed to a particular grammatical gender or another, it has to do with the gender having been ascribed by tradition and the use of speakers as in the following examples: "o xis / o samba / a mesa / a caricatura" (chalk / the samba / the table / the caricature).
Galician expresses the difference in number with a form for the singular and another for the plural. The most typical suffix to express a plural number is "s", "cantiga / cantigas".
There are two different ways of addressing people: one is the most usual informal pronoun "ti" for the second person singular and "vos" for the second person plural. There are formal ways of addressing directly people "vostede" for the singular and "vostedes" for the plural.
The last review of the official grammar has established that the exclamation and question marks will appear only at the end of the sentence if there is no risk of confusion.
The verb is inflected. There are regular and irregular verbs in the language. All verbs will appear listed by means of their infinitive form in dictionaries, and there are three typical endings for verbs "-ar / -er / ir".
All words have accent in Galician, considering that the accent is the fact of a particular syllable carrying the most stress in a word. The "tilde (´)" is a small line written over some vowels to show in some cases which syllable carries the accent, "paspallás", "móbil" "cárcere" .
The tilde has some other functions. Sometimes the tilde is written to show that there is not a diphthong among two vowels which happen to be alongside one another within the same word "aínda" ( yet). If the tilde happens to be necessary in a capitalized letter, it must be written regardless: "Óscar". Another use is the differentiation of meaning: there are words which can be differentiated by the presence or absence of the tilde: "cómpre" ( it is necessary) versus "compre" as in "Cómpre que compre un reloxio" .
Read more about this topic: Galician Language
Famous quotes containing the word grammar:
“The new grammar of race is constructed in a way that George Orwell would have appreciated, because its rules make some ideas impossible to express—unless, of course, one wants to be called a racist.”
—Stephen Carter (b. 1954)
“Syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages. Syntactic investigation of a given language has as its goal the construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language under analysis.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“I went to a very militantly Republican grammar school and, under its influence, began to revolt against the Establishment, on the simple rule of thumb, highly satisfying to a ten-year-old, that Irish equals good, English equals bad.”
—Bernadette Devlin (b. 1947)