El prefijo verbal be-
[Nota: se puede leer más sobre los términos subrayados en el glosario al final del artículo.]
¿Te has percatado de que ciertos verbos en inglés empiezan con el prefijo be-? ¿Te has preguntado alguna vez por qué?
El voseo
A topic often neglected in courses of Spanish is that of el voseo, or the use of vos as a familiar form of address for the second person in the singular. This is used in about a dozen different countries in Central and South America,1 and it is another subject where there is wide regional variation in its use. In some areas it does not exist at all, in others it completely replaces tú, and in yet others it coexists with both tú and usted. In some regions the pronoun is used but with the tú forms of verbs; in others it goes with its own inflected forms. And to further complicate matters, the way that these inflections are formed also varies greatly.2,3 Given such complexities in its use, we’ll limit ourselves here to illustrating some of the grammatical aspects of only a single form of voseo, namely that accepted as the standard in Argentina. But before doing that, however, we’ll take a brief look at the interesting history of this feature of the language.
- 1. According to Wikipedia, “Vos is used extensively as the primary spoken form of the second-person singular in various countries around Latin America, including Argentina, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Paraguay, and Uruguay but only in Argentina, Uruguay, and increasingly in Paraguay and Nicaragua, is it also the standard written form. […] Vos is present in other countries as a regionalism, for instance in the Maracucho Spanish of Zulia State, Venezuela, in Chiapas, a state in southern Mexico, and in various states in Colombia.” — http://en.wikipedia.com/wiki/Voseo↩
- 2. theWikibook (in Spanish) http://es.wikibooks.org/wiki/Espa%C3%B1ol_/_La_conjugaci%C3%B3n_/_El_voseo provides a comprehensive comparison of the regional variations of el voseo and includes details of the differing ways in which the inflections are formed↩
- 3. http://www.sopreproc.org/voseadores2.html provides conjugation tables illustrating ‘pure’, Venezuelan and Argentinian variants of the inflection↩
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