Contrasting Spanish and Italian

Since I've already touched upon the subject of verb conjugations and attempted to illustrate how Spanish, as a daughter language of Latin, arguably surpasses the mother language in linguistic beauty; it is perhaps good and proper at this time to point out once again the pattern at work which Spanish uses to achieve its high sonorous quality. One of the crowning distinctives found in Spanish is its unrelenting quest to make its word order harmonious thereby achieving uncomplicated sounds and preventing harsh sounding ones. Though I've made comparisons with other languages in previous posts, let me try once again this time with Italian. To ask the question in Italian "What is this?" you'd say: "Che cosa e questo?" Now although the Spanish version might sound quite similar "¿Qué cosa es esto?", Spanish adds an "s" in the verb and continues the same "s" sound by eliminating the "qu" sound in the impersonal pronoun thus achieving a most pleasing alliteration in a simple four word sentence. Now we can answer the question by saying "It's a pencil". In Italian, "E una matita". In Spanish, "Es un lápiz". Here again we find the tendency in Italian for short choppy sounds, while the Spanish equivalent does away with that by adding and subtracting letters where needed in the interest of modulating to a more harmonious sound.  The verb "Es" flows naturally to the article "un" and then we slide on to the the subject "lápiz" which ends naturally with the same "s" sound we began with. 

In my next post we'll consider the use of diphthongs and the phenomenon of stem changing verbs in the interest of examining further the inherent beauty and precision of the Spanish language.

Bendiciones,

Ed