"Disculpar" - "Disculpen la tardanza" .

Question

**Hola a todos.

Tengo una pregunta de "disculpar).

When I checked the dictionary on this forum, I saw that it shows an example of "disculpar":

Disculpen la tardanza  -  I'm sorry for being late.

My questions is why the third person plural subjunctive tense is used here.

My thought was that "disculpen" refers to "you" plural formal way. But if there is only person, would it be "disculpe la tardanza"?

Gracias de antemano.

Marco**

Answer 1

It's not that Spanish vowels and consonants are identical to Japanese - they are not even identical to Portuguese, which is just across the border and has an almost identical vocabulary. What happens is that both languages have very few sounds. As opposed to English, which has like 10,000, or Chinese, which has like a million or something

You seem to be confusing sounds with their written representations. The range of phonemes in natural languages (on this planet) is (roughly) 15-40. Chinese (depending on the dialect) can have 3-5 tones but in the usual phonetic descriptions, one speaks of the same phoneme with different tones, not, for example, five phonemes differing only in tone. Even if one counted phoneme+tone pairs, that would only give you about 200 "sounds" for Chinese. Similarly with English, unless you are trying to count,for example "two", "too" and "to" as three different sounds, there is no possible way to arrive at a figure of 10,000. The typically cited figure would be 30-40.

Even for vocabulary (which is not at all the same thing as sounds) your figures are wildly exaggerated. There is no dictionary for Chinese that contains million words (as main entries), much less a million sounds.

Samdie, you know much of Chinese.

I didn't think about what you said even though Chinese is my native language.
We have 5 tones. I think English doesn't have it, right? That's why it's hard for English speakers or other language speakers to pronounce Chinese words because these people are not used to pronouncing words with different tones.

Thank you,

Marco

Answer 2

We have 5 tones. I think English doesn't have it, right? That's why it's hard for English speakers or other language speakers to pronounce Chinese words because these people are not used to pronouncing words with different tones.

Yes, the tones are the most difficult aspect of learning Chinese for speakers of European and other languages. In English we have a few words whose meaning varies with stress (similar, but not the same as, the tones in Chinese), an example of which is invalid, which can mean an unwell person (INvalid) or not valid (inVALid).

I've traveled all over the world, and everywhere I've gone I have learned at least a dozen or so of the local words (how much, thanks, where is, etc.) and have used them without much trouble, but not in China. No one understood me very well, either in the north (Mandarin) or in the south (Cantonese). I resorted to writing my questions in modified Japanese (pigeon Chinese)! Of course, that was just by learning from a simple guide book, and I'm sure I could learn the tones with proper instruction.

Answer 3

I've traveled all over the world, and everywhere I've gone I have learned at least a dozen or so of the local words (how much, thanks, where is, etc.) and have used them without much trouble, but not in China. No one understood me very well, either in the north (Mandarin) or in the south (Cantonese). I resorted to writing my questions in modified Japanese (pigeon Chinese)! Of course, that was just by learning from a simple guide book, and I'm sure I could learn the tones with proper instruction.

Hi James, I don't know what language you learned because we have too many local languages. I know that it's not easy to understand what you say without tones because there are too many possibilities. But if you learned Mandarin, what you say should be understood in most parts of China if you speak slowly because we know you are not Chinese and what you say is supposed to be like it without tones. That's not news for us.

But in Cantonese speaking area, I don't know because many people even don't know what we say in Mandarin even though Mandarin is the formal language in China. (For sure we don't understand each other if we speak different local languages. )

Marco