Le vs. Lo - pronouns
le amo, le debo diez libras.....I thought this meant : I love him, I owe him 10 pounds. However, according to my grammar book, there is no pronoun 'le'. It appears to be 'la' or 'lo'. Can anybody help? How do I say ' I love him' 'I owe him ten pounds'? Thanks
3 Answers
"Le" is the indirect object pronoun. "Lo" and "la" are the direct object pronouns.
If you want to say you owe ten pounds to him and use a pronoun to substitute for him, it must be an indirect object pronoun.
I (subject) owe (verb) ten pounds (direct object) to him (indirect object)
"Lo debo" would just mean "I owe it" and in the above sentence, the "it" is the money. To whom you owe it is not covered by "lo." Though I suppose you could directly owe him. That is to say, you owe him as a person to someone else, lol! As in "I owe Bob to Jill." As in, Jill is entitled to Bob, and you've got Bob, somehow, and therefore you owe Bob to Jill. Let's just leave aside the enormously odd implications of that one for the moment, though.
In other words, "le debo diez libras" means "I owe him ten pounds." You could trim it down even more and tack the indirect object pronoun AND the direct object pronoun before the verb and do away with both objects in your sentence. That would take the form: "Se lo debo."
(When you use both an indirect object pronoun AND a direct object pronoun, the "le" turns to "se" just so you're not saying "le lo" which is really cumbersome. But I'm pointing it out only because indirect pronouns DO exist, and "lo" would not work here to represent the person to whom you owe the money.)
As for your other sentence, I am going to stay out of that one because the person whom you love is a direct object and I think the technical answer is that "le" does not work. But in Spain, "le amo" is quite common, as well as "le quiero" and that's how I learned it. Apparently, it has a name, and it's called "leísmo" and it's when you basically "le"-ify everything if it corresponds to a person, regardless of whether they are the direct OR the indirect object in the sentence. So just know that if you are in Spain, "le amo" works just fine, but you might get some grammarians elsewhere who would take issue with that. I have no opinion on the subject because the fact that "le amo" is not universally used is recent knowledge to me.
But that does not mean there are not plenty of situations in which you have an indirect object in your sentence, whether it be person or thing, and "le" is your pronoun. It very much exists because indirect objects and direct objects are different things.
Head above water seems to have covered everything very well but I would confirm that 'lo amo' would be the correct form of 'I love him' - having said that you will likely hear 'le amo' in Spain, incorrect grammatically but commonly used.
This is from a beginner in Spanish. 'Le' is the third person singular indirect object pronoun, the one who receives the action of the verb amo.
