Whyyyy

[ysobel]

So I got to the question unit

for the record, the relevant words are:

qué - what
quién(es) - who
cuál(es) - which
cómo - how
cuánto - how many/much
cuándo - when

(with a note that cuál is used before es when not asking for definition. Qué es una gata = what is a cat, cuál es tu gata = which is your cat)

and AUGH SPANISH WHY are some of these q and some c? I mean, cómo I get, but why cuánto/cuándo and not quánto/quándo WHYYYYY

(Okay, so it's not the same sound, because cu is [kw] and qu is [k] and so it makes sense, *but* English qu is [kw] and so I keep writing quándo when they say cuándo, sob.)

ETA Another sob: Cuál es (which is it) and Cuáles (which-plural) sound the same wah.

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In I-amuse-myself news, Duolinguo gave me "¿Cuándo bebes vino?" -- when do you drink wine -- as a question to translate, so of course I had to say aloud, in a super dramatic voice, "Yo no bebo ... *vino*..."

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ETA Sentence of the day: Nosotros no tocamos el pollo! (We don't touch the chicken)

Previous sentences of the day (on other days) include Yo soy un oso (I am a bear) and Yo soy un pingüino (I am a penguin).

Comments

[asciident]

Modern words starting with cua- were qua- until the Academy's 1815 orthography update.

It is also worth noting that the use of qu for /k/ before e and i results from the generalized loss (according to Penny (1991: 83-4), at a period prior to the development of written Spanish) of the glide [w] from reflexes of Latin QU-, as in the case of QUINDECIM, which became Spanish quince ('fifteen'). Before stressed /a/, however, the glide was not eliminated, and it was only in 1815 that the Academy replaced qua- by cua-. Thus modern cuando [kwándo] was written as quando until the last century.

(source for quote)

ETA: Also, Cuál es vs Cuáles is fucking hard to distinguish until you get used to accents and can understand the whole sentence more quickly.

[ysobel]

Eeeeenteresting.

(Not that I'm a language nerd.)

And "Cuál es" was the *entirety* of the sentence (which sometimes is sentence fragment), but I got dinged for putting "Cuáles" instead. (Granted, if I'd done the turtle version of the audio, where there's a longer space between words, I might have gotten it; but since it made sense in my head and didn't have conflicting context, I didn't bother. Mrrr. Silly website.