God blessed Spanish with so few contractions!

Question

And no apostrophes to fuss over, either.

Or, at least, that's my impression...

Answer 1

I agree! I"m so grateful that there's only the "al" and "del" to worry about.

I often feel bad for people that are learning English. Not only is everything reduced to contractions, but we have all those verb conjugation exceptions to worry about.

Plus the truly weird spellings. (Enuff said?) - 0057ed01, Nov 23, 2009

Answer 2

HI vlapon, thank you for your kind words, but no, Lazarus's words were pure contractions, not used nowadays, mind you.

* daca = de acá
* dello = de + ello
* dentreambos
* dese = de + ese
* esotro = eso + otro

Answer 3

Would words like "Vámanos" be considered a contraction of "Vamos nos"? In a way I believe it is. (Other examples: Considerémonos, Regocijémonos, Acerquémonos, Fijémonos, Esforcémonos.)

However considering that one would not say "Vamos nos" means it is not interchangeable and therefore might not be a true contraction like "can't" is for "cannot".

Those are not considered contractions in Spanish. That's simply the proper conjugation of the words. The only true contractions are "del" and "al" (there are others but they are no longer used) - --Mariana--, Nov 23, 2009

Ahh, yes. I guess I should have read the link provided by Heidita first. :-) Thanks! - chaparrito, Nov 23, 2009

Answer 4

Good link, thank you. But it seems to me that Lazarus and others cited compound words, rather than contractions.

A contraction must have fewer letters than the two words it's replacing - which is paraphrasing the excellent point you made in your comment on that site.

Answer 5

You will find this thread interesting.

After reading it Izan opened a thread with the contractions mentioned by Lazarus and I had to insisit: forget about them!! jeje

These kind of contractions were only used in very old literature.

Answer 6

I was just thinking that myself recently. I use a lot of contractions in English and I don't think I have seen one in Spanish yet. I guess that is the compensation for all the tildes.