No hablo ametralladora… Spanish contractions…
I realise this is not the first question on Spanishdict about this, but I’ve looked at some of the others and they seem to deal mainly with ‘formal contractions’, e.g. ‘al’ & ‘del’. Accordingly, I’m now asking about what I call ‘informal contractions’.
I was watching a Spanish film yesterday evening (with English subtitles) & struggling to follow the Spanish. Some of the actors spoke so fast it seems to me that surely Spanish must use informal contractions.
First, I would suggest that English has no formal contractions but many informal contractions, e.g. I’m, he’s, you’re, I’ve, I’d, don’t, can’t etc. These are informal because one shouldn’t use them in formal written English, or so it is taught. However, almost all native speakers use them when speaking almost always, and indeed not to use them in speech would feel unnatural & be quite hard, requiring serious conscious effort, and the resultant dialogue would sound stilted.
I’ve heard it said that to foreign ears spoken English sounds quite fluid by comparison, for example, with German, which is more staccato. I suspect this fluidity of sound wouldn’t be possible without these informal contractions.
To the ears of native English speakers, or at least to mine, Spanish too sounds rather fluid, and sometimes very fast. Therefore, I’d be surprised if Spanish speakers don’t use informal contractions (I’ve studied only very little German yet expect I could probably understand as much of a German film as I could of a Spanish film, even after six months of studying Spanish; my problem with German isn’t so much the rhythm of speech as the vocabulary and grammar).
French, which is of course a cousin Romance language with many similar features and much common vocabulary (albeit often significantly different pronunciation) recognises many more contractions as formal, because their spoken forms are replicated in writing, e.g. j’ai, c’est, qu’on, qu’il, qu’est, qu’un, n’est, au, aux, du, des. And French also uses some informal contractions, which, in my experience, are usually not taught in school classes or learning courses, and generally only replicated in informal writing or reported speech, e.g, j’suis, t’es, t’as.
To take the example, ‘qu’est’, it results from the elision between ‘que’ + ‘est’, e.g. ‘qu’est-ce que c’est’.
Spanish also uses ‘que’ and ‘es’, which words have broadly similar meanings (I realise French also uses ‘qui’ (which usually doesn’t contract) where Spanish sometimes uses ‘que’).
In Spanish do ‘que’ + ‘es’ ever contract to ‘qu’es’ ?
Do ‘que’ + ‘un’ / ‘uno’ / ‘una’ ever contract to ‘qu’un’ / ‘qu’uno’ / ‘qu’una’ ?
And if there are informal contractions, are there any with more than a single meaning like ‘I’d’ in English, which can mean ‘I had’ or ‘I would’ ?
4 Answers
"Pa'" for para "to' for todo, or even "todos" "Pa' que for "para que" and a bunch more with "pa" -"voy pa'l norte"--I'm going up north, etc.
Ex. Salgo pa' España mañana.
Ex. To' los días tengo que ir a trabajar.
Even "tengo" gets shortened down to "teino" with the "n" being a slight nasal as used in French.
There are more. If I can think of them I will do una "redacción" That's what you call an "edit" in Spanish. If you can find a current Mexican novela, you will see a bunch of them.
Great Subject!
(redaccion #1) Mi'jo mi'ja or "mijo" "mija" I love what Manity says also.
This is a topic I find very interesting and I'd love to see a discussion on well... how the Spanish do it, haha. From what I've seen so far it seems that this whole area is structured in a slightly different way that in English.
First of all, omissions of consonants left, right and centre - the 'h' is silent (duh), a lot of time the 's' is omitted and also the 'd' is omitted quite often, especially at the end of words (ciuda-, navida- and as part of the -do ending). Secondly, when the same vowel is repeated in adjacent slots, the end result sounds like a single short vowel unless the speaker speaks slowly and carefully articulates the sounds (e.g. ella ha asistido = eiasistido or mi hijita or dónde está). Different adjacent vowels sometimes form a diphthong. Again, this mostly concerns less significant words like pronouns and the auxiliary particle of the present perfect. In this sense you have a point about qu'es and qu'uno in normal-speed colloquial speech, when the emphasis is not on that part of the sentence. Informal, unofficial, never in writing, and I really doubt there are cases with more than a single meaning.
pa que preguntas falda?
Falda, they just speak fast, very fast, and they are sloppy with consonants and they join words together, at least here in the South, but there are no ' official' shortenings. Hasta luego sounds like ' a'auéo' for example..
It is also very important for any self-respecting Andaluz not to open the mouth much whilst speaking..
En boca cerrada no entran moscas, that's probably why.
