Download In the DELE exam, to be or not to be, feminine or

In the DELE exam, to be or
not
to
be,
feminine
or
masculine – those are the
questions…
In the marking of the DELE exam (the examen DELE for the
Spanish proficiency diploma), one of the four main criteria
that the examiners apply is called “correctness”.
This criterion relates to how grammatically and semantically
correct the candidate uses the Spanish language in the written
and oral expression exam tasks. The semantically correct part
refers to the apt and faultless use of words and idiomatic
expressions – that is, a question of vocabulary (plus, in the
oral, pronouncing the words correctly, and in the written
tasks, spelling them without mistakes). The grammatically
correct part refers essentially to avoiding common mistakes
which are easy for examiners to pick up. Two of the most
common of these, are the incorrect use of the verbs “ser” and
“estar”, and mistakes in ensuring that nouns and their
definite articles or related descriptors such as adjectives,
agree in gender.
One of the most confusing aspect of Spanish verbs for an
English-speaker, is when to use “ser” and when “estar” (two
distinct verbs in Spanish, but which both translate in English
into “to be”). When it comes to correctness in relation to
nouns, the most challenging issue is that of gender – with all
Spanish nouns being either “masculine” or “feminine”.
To be or not to be…
English-speakers are often said to be confused by the fact
that “Spanish has two verbs for expressing to be”. But is it
really correct that English expresses all states of being with
simply “to be”? How do English and Spanish differ in this
regard? To understand when to use “ser” and when “estar”, one
needs to understand the distinct roots and meaning of each.
But firstly, it is important to understand how and why English
evolved differently.
Our starting point on the journey to understanding the
divergence between English and Spanish, is the different root
forms of “to be” that existed in our common Proto-IndoEuropean ancestor language. Discovering these roots will help
explain why “to be” in English ends up being so very irregular
(I am, you are, she is, he was, they will be, we were, etc.).
The fact that, in all Indo-European languages, the verb for
“to be” happens to be their most irregular verb, stems from
two main reasons. The first is that it has the highest
frequency of use (thus more incentive and opportunity for
simplification). Secondly, in its simplification, its original
composite parts tended to be rolled into one or two so-called
conglomerate verbs (meaning that each new simplification is a
hodgepodge of bits and pieces from different ancestral verb
roots, thrown together by the vagaries of everyday common
usage).
So, which were the PIE roots from which modern-day Spanish
“ser” and “estar” derive, as well as the English “to be” with
its many seemingly unrelated variations (is, are, was, were,
am, been etc.)?
We cannot be absolutely sure about
pronunciation, but the following root verbs are today widely
recognized:
“sta-” : In PIE this appears to have meant “to stand”. In
classical Latin, “sto / stare” retained this meaning, but in
the everyday or Vulgar Latin of the common Romans, it came to
be used as a copula (i.e., as a “to be” verb that couples
something to its status – “the sky is blue”). The PIE verb
“sta-” is the root of one of the two modern-day Spanish copula
verbs, namely “estar”. This PIE root is also at the origin of
the modern word “status” (a Spanish and English cognate, which
is to say it has the same meaning in both languages).
“es-” : The English “is” traces its roots to this verb, as do
the Latin “est” and Spanish “es” (the latter a present
indicative conjugation of the other Spanish copula verb,
namely “ser”). It appears that the PIE root “es-” meant much
the same as modern-day “is”. The word “essence” also derives
from this root.
“bhu-” : The original meaning of this PIE verb probably was
“to grow”, or “to become”. It has survived in English as the
infinitive be and the participle been. In Latin,
the PIE
sound “b” transformed to /f/, giving us the Latin fuī, which
today is one of the past tense (pretérito) conjugations of the
Spanish verb “ser”.
“wes- ”: In PIE this may have meant “to live”. It is the root
for the modern English “was” and “were”.
“er-” : The modern English word “are” seems to derive from
this, apparently via Old Norse, with probably at its far
origin the PIE root “es-”.
What one can easily see from the above, is that the English
“to be” is in fact far more of an irregular conglomerate than
the two Spanish copulae of “ser” and “estar”. So how does
English, with only one verb for the many nuances of being,
convey these different nuances? It is common in English to use
adjectives to describe the status or essence of something or
someone: “Paul is bored” describes Paul’s current state, but
“Paul is boring” describes an essential characteristic of his.
The Spanish way of conveying such a distinction is different,
because the adjective stays the same but the copula (i.e., the
choice of verb “to be”) is chosen according to whether we want
to signal a status or an essence: I am bored = Estoy aburrido,
I am boring = Soy aburrido.
We have looked at the PIE roots of the English and Spanish “to
be” verbs, in order to show first the causes for the
divergence of English. Now, for an understanding of the
meaning of the Spanish “ser” and “estar” we must move forward
in time from the PIE stage to Vulgar Latin, from which Spanish
most directly evolved. The Spanish verb “ser” is derived from
the Latin “essere” (the root of the English word “essence”)
and “estar” from the Latin “stare” (the root of English words
such as “state” and “status”).
In Spanish, “ser” is used when the fundamental essence of
something or somebody is described, and “estar” when a state
of being is described.
It is sometimes said that “ser”
relates to a trait that is “permanent” and “estar” to
something “temporary”, to a “condition”. This distinction
often has casual validity, but “essence” and “state” are the
true indicators – permanent and temporary can, in themselves,
be confusing, for example when you deal with a concept such as
death (a “condition”, but one that’s definitely not
temporary!). As Sam Gendreau explained in the lingholic blog:
So for example, if we were to talk about somebody who died, in
Spanish we would not say “es muerto” (he’s dead, using ser),
but rather “está muerto” (he’s dead, using estar). Being dead
is a state, albeit a permanent one. But no one is dead in
“essence”. (Well, if you were to talk about a zombie, or
Dracula, you could probably use “ser” instead of “estar”,
since in this case, they are truly dead in essence).”
To further illustrate the difference between “ser” and
“estar”, let’s look at this example:
With ser: “¿Cómo es tu madre?” – what is your mother like?;
and
With estar: “¿Cómo está tu madre?” – how is your mother
feeling?
In these examples, “ser” evidently relates to the mother’s
essential characteristics – her personality traits. Is she
generous by nature, or selfish? Tender or aggressive? On the
other hand, “estar” relates to her state – is she well, or is
she ill?
To sum up – in English we would select the right adjective
with which to indicate whether we are describing the essence
of something or someone, or on the other hand his/its status.
In Spanish, however, we would convey this distinction by
selecting the right copula verb, using “ser” for essence and
“estar” for state.
Having placed you hopefully in a state of full understanding
of the essential difference between “ser” and “estar”, we can
now proceed to seeking agreement on the role of gender in
Spanish (which is important, because of the rule that there
must be concordancia – agreement – in Spanish between the
gender of the noun and that of the definite articles,
adjectives etc. used with it).
Female libido and male dilemmas:
Grammatical gender is a system of noun classification present
in approximately one fourth of the world’s languages. In
languages with grammatical gender, each noun is assigned to
one of the gender classes. Most such languages have from two
to four different gender classes, but some have up to 20!
However, gender in linguistics in fact is not tied up with
biological sex – as Steven Pinker explains in “The Language
Instinct” in relation to the 16 genders of Kivunjo, a language
belonging to the Bantu (South & Central African) linguistic
family: “In case you are wondering, these ‘genders’ do not
pertain to things like cross-dressers, transsexuals,
hermaphrodites, androgynous people, and so on… To a linguist,
the term gender retains its original meaning of ‘kind’, as in
the related words generic, genus, and genre.
The Bantu
‘genders’ refer to kinds like humans, animals, extended
objects, clusters of objects, and body parts. It just happens
that in many European languages the genders correspond to the
sexes…” (in the case of most Indo-European languages, gender
classes have labels such as male, female and neuter).
In gender-based systems, gender is considered an inherent
quality of nouns, and it affects the forms of other related
words through a process called agreement (Spanish =
concordancia). This means that nouns and for example
adjectives that qualify them, must agree in their gender
class, as well as in number (meaning plural or singular).
Nouns may be considered the “triggers” of the process of
agreement, while other words will be the “target” of these
prescribed variations, such as regards their endings. The
latter have to harmonize with the noun and thereby often
contribute to the harmonic “musicality” of the language (i.e.,
the ending of the noun and the adjective will sound the same,
both for
instance ending on “-a” in the typical feminine
configuration).
For modern-day English-speakers the concept of noun gender is
foreign, because English, like another modern Indo-European
language, Afrikaans, have nearly completely lost grammatical
gender (although Old English still had it).
Proto-Indo-European initially had two “genders”, being animate
and inanimate (showing thereby, once again, that “gender” in
Linguistics has got nothing to do with biological sex). The
animate gender in Proto-Indo-European later split into
masculine and feminine, thus originating the three-way
classification into masculine, feminine, and neuter (i.e.,
inanimate). Many Indo-European languages retained these three
genders, including most Slavic languages, Latin, Sanskrit,
Ancient and Modern Greek, and German. However, many languages
evolved, reducing the number of genders to two. Some lost the
neuter, leaving masculine and feminine; these include
most Romance languages, of which Spanish is part. Thus the
three grammatical genders of Classical Latin were replaced by
a two-gender system in Spanish.
The neuter gender of classical Latin was absorbed by the
masculine gender class in Spanish. Nouns in Spanish that
denote specifically male persons (or animals) are normally of
masculine gender. Those that denote biologically female
persons (or animals) are normally of feminine gender. Since
all things, and thus all nouns, must belong to a linguistic
gender class, those nouns that denote something that does not
have any sex have been willy-nilly allocated to one of the two
genders classes by common usage, often in apparently arbitrary
manner.
Why do we encounter so much apparent “arbitrariness” in most
languages? It should be understood that our present-day
fondness of “rules” post-date the establishment of these
languages by centuries, if not millennia. It wasn’t ever a
case of a committee on linguistics meeting in some cave
dwelling and establishing nice “rules” for evolving languages,
which ancient populations then all dutifully followed. On the
contrary, even the latter-day official language committees
like the Spanish Royal Academy can at most try to condense
generalized codifications from the real-world, idiosyncratic
speaking habits of highly diverse populations. Like all human
activity and social evolution, the evolution of language also
is haphazard and often impacted by outside forces. Of the
latter, the notions of linguistic purity and logical
consistency rarely were the strong suits.
In Spanish, nouns that end in –o or a consonant are mostly
masculine, whereas those that end in –a are mostly feminine,
regardless of their meaning. These “rules” regarding endings
on “-a” and “-o” may override biological reality in some
cases: for example, the noun miembro (“member”) is always
masculine,
even
when
it
refers
to
a
woman,
and persona (“person”) is always feminine, even when it refers
to a man. But then – quite counter-intuitively – we have “la
libido” and “el dilemma”. (Persons of the female persuasion
are normally quite comfortable with allocating “la razon” to
their side of the fence, and with having “el problema”
assigned to the masculine gender…)
In other cases, though, meaning does take precedence, through
varying the definite article (el or la) going with the noun,
according to biology : the noun comunista “communist” is
masculine when it refers or could refer to a man, even though
it ends with -a (i.e., el communista). This is a deviation
from the typical rule that the definite article for each noun
is fixed according to the noun’s allotted gender class.
Another deviation from the norm is that nouns can sometimes
vary their termination to indicate a different sex. Thus, in
Spanish, niño means “boy”, and niña means “girl”. This
paradigm can be exploited for making new words: from
abogado “lawyer”, diputado “member of parliament” and doctor
“doctor”, it was straightforward to make the feminine
equivalents abogada, diputada, and doctora.
In general practice, though, nouns in Spanish generally follow
the gender class of the Latin words from which they are
derived. When nouns appear to deviate from the rules for
gender, there is usually an etymological explanation, related
to its origin: problema (“problem”) is masculine in Spanish
because it was derived from a Greek noun of the neuter gender
(and the neuter was later absorbed into the masculine),
whereas radio (“radio station”) is feminine, because it is a
shortening of estación de radio, a phrase with as its head the
feminine noun estación (or also: la radiodifusión). The same
applies to “la moto” (the motorcycle) because “moto” is short
for “motocicleta”, which is feminine.
When memorizing noun gender, it will be noticed that the
counter-intuitive masculinity of many nouns ending on “-a” is
due to their Greek origin – particularly words relating to
science. As mentioned above, in the original Greek their
gender was “neuter” and they were absorbed as such into the
Latin “neuter” gender class, when classic Latin had three
gender classes. In consequence, when Vulgar Latin / Old
Spanish discarded the “neuter” gender and folded it into their
“masculine”, these Greek-derived words ending on “-a”, became
“male”.
Perhaps the quickest way to undo misconceptions about the
supposed male or female gender class of all Spanish nouns is,
therefore, to re-affirm that in general it has nothing
whatsoever to do with biological gender. It could just as
well have been called red and green nouns, or – more to the
point – the “la/las” nouns and the “el/los” nouns. Like verb
conjugations, the correct gender class of nouns has to be
learnt through rote memorization, for which flashcards are
very useful, whether of the digital or the cardboard type.
Just remember to always note on each card, the Spanish noun
together with its correct definite article (la or el) and
learn the combination.
To relate the above to the DELE exam scoring criterion of
correctness, one can see how incorrect use of “ser” and
“estar” and mistakes in gender agreement would leap in the eye
of a native Spanish-speaking examiner. Such errors may often
relate to idiosyncrasies that deviate from the norm, but the
same applies to English – just think of how quickly you’d spot
somebody saying “two oxes” (on the regular model of “two
boxes”) instead of “two oxen”. These idiosyncrasies exist in
all languages, and there is no alternative to learning them by
heart if we want to speak “correctly” (incidentally, “ox” in
Old English belonged to the feminine gender class, which in
the plural ended on “-en”, which is the reason for its
apparent deviation; other similar Old English words have
however succumbed to common modern usage, like “one cow / two
kine” which became “two cows”).
It is important to note with regard to the DELE exams, that
one should not over-emphasize occasional small errors of the
above kind – as long as the meaning that the candidate tried
to convey still could be clearly understood. The DELE exams
are, above all, tests of communicative ability – and
communication by definition is the art of conveying meaning.
In other words, it is not primarily a grammar exam, although
no-one would want to throw away marks on repeated errors that
could have been avoided. It should also be noted that it is
perfectly in order to correct oneself during the oral exam,
when you realize that you’ve slipped up on something like
gender agreement or the choice of ser / estar – according to
the official marking criteria, you will actually be positively
assessed for such self-correction. Clearly it is better,
though, to master it all and to practice during your DELE exam
preparation to apply these forms consistently correctly…
Fuller explanations of gender agreement and the correct use of
ser and estar – together with much more clarification of other
puzzling aspects of Spanish grammar – can be found in our
DELEhelp Workbook #2 entitled “Demystifying Spanish Grammar”.
Just as with our Workbook #9.2 (DELE Exam Orientation and
Acing Tips), our Workbook #2 is also available free as a .pdf
download from DropBox to any readers of this DELEhelp blog who
ask for it via our easy-to-use contact form:
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Salu2
Willem
https://edele.org