Linguistic Comparison of English and Spanish
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What are the comparisons of English to Spanish linguistically? What are differences in morphology or rules of the language. What are the syntactic differences? Phonetically, how do they differ?
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The solution provides a linguistic comparison of English and Spanish. The syntactic differences are provided.
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1. PHONOLOGY: Phonology is the sound system of a language. In Spanish, you have 18 consonants and 5 vowel sounds. Some of the consonants are categorized as "labiodentalized", such as /b/, others are "dentalized", such as /d/. /s/, and /z/. This has to do with where the tongue is placed in relation to the teeth in the mouth when producing these consonant sounds. It can greatly affect the language acquisition of the ELL students and account for mispronunciations and misspellings in the target language of English.
Phonemes - Small units of sound. There are contrasting speech sounds in Spanish and in English. Spanish has 5 vowel sounds. English has 11. Thus, English can have variations within each of its 5 vowels, - a,e ,i,o,u. In contrast, Spanish has only 1 sound for each vowel. This is why Spanish is considered an easier language than English to acquire as a 2nd language - less variations, less rules, less exceptions to the rules. Spanish has "trills'", where the tongue is 'rolled' ; for example, in the pronunciation of the 'r', the tongue is slightly rolled, making it sound like the English 'd', and in double rr, /rr/ - it is doubly rolled and the tongue is vibrated to produce a stronger, longer sound.
Syllables - Units of language - smaller than words but larger than phonemes. Spanish words have higher numbers of syllables in general and each syllable sounds longer and is more 'broken up' ...