Despite the apparent disdain shown by the classicists toward scholars of modern romance languages, learning Spanish accomplished those same spelling improvement goals for me.

Those who participated in the evolution of Spanish from Latin unwittingly but wisely eliminated all those pesky declensions with their weird case-dependent endings.

Spanish is a perfectly good language with almost as many native speakers as English.

It shouldn't take a whole conjugation of linguists to understand that.

~~~ jerry

Sadly they didn't go so far as English - which eliminated genders and the dependency on them.

Why, for example, should a fly be feminine and a mosquito masculine -when clearly each specie will have examples of both genders?

Richard English

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Why, for example, should a fly be feminine and a mosquito masculine -when clearly each specie will have examples of both genders?

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Richard English

Why, indeed! My favorite linguistics professor suggested that the only proper answer that a native speaker should give to any "Why" questions about his language is: "Because that's the way my grandfather did it."

You're right, Richard. Spanish, although comfortably consistent in orthography and phonology, is not logical in its assignment of grammatical gender to nouns. Your example: La mosca, el zancudo. Even more to the point, consider La verga, versus el clítoris.

The General Semanticists are right when they remind us that the word is not the thing.

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learning Spanish accomplished those same spelling improvement goals for me.

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I have had both Spanish and Latin, and, as can be seen by my recent post in pet peeves, still need a spell-checker.

Specie"is coined money. The taxonomic category species is both singular and plural. I got this wrong on a test in college. The convoluted "True or False" question:

"If the plural of genus is genera, then the singular of species is specie". I marked "T".

Tinman

That's right, of course. I have seen the word specie used (obviously wrongly) in good journals and never thought to check it. Now I know!

With maybe 5 million English words to choose from it's maybe surprising that we don't get them wrong more frequently!

Richard English

Series is another word where the singular and plural are the same. I've seen several messages on the Internet asking about a particular "serie" -- some may have been from non-native English speakers, but I doubt that they all were.