Accent—The stress in the Castilian word may fall on the final syllable, the penult or the antepenult; occasionally it may fall upon a syllable more than three places removed from the end of the word. All words not stressed on the final or the penult must have a written accent. Words ending in a consonant except n or s normally stress the last syllable and need no written accent; those so stressed and ter minating in n or s must have the written accent. Words ending in a vowel or diphthong and stressing the penult need no written accent ; but all words stressing a final vowel or diph thong require the written accent thereon.
Morphology.— For substantives a great simplification has occurred in the passage from Latin to Castilian, in that the six cases of the noun and adjective have been reduced to one in Castilian, and this usually corresponds to the Latin accusative singular and plural. Latin genitive, dative and ablative relations are ren dered by combinations of prepositions with the single Castilian form; del hombre, "of the man,* Latin, hominis, etc. In the personal pro nouns there are still certain case distinctions: yo, °I," me, "me," a ml, "to me," etc. There are no neuter nouns in Castilian; the Latin neuters become masculines for the most part, but a few become feminine.
The verb system also shows a reduction of the complex system of Latin inflections, but it still possesses many and varied conjugational forms. The Latin passive voice disappeared; its place has been taken by periphrases with the passive participle or by a reflexive or other construction. The Latin future indicative tense did not survive; it was replaced by a new form made by adding the present tense of Castilian haber, 'to have," to the infinitive of the main verb: amar, °to love," plus he, "I have," °mare, °I shall love." Suffixes derived from the imperfect indicative of haber are used simi larly to form a past future (or conditional) on the infinitive of the main verb as a base. Cas tilian perfect tenses are formed by combining tenses of haber, "to have," with the past par ticiple of the main verb; he amado, "I have loved." The Latin imperfect subjunctive was
lost, but Castilian has two such tenses (ending in -se and -ra in the first singular), of which the one comes from the Latin pluperfect sub junctive and the other from the Latin plu perfect indicative. There is a future subjunc tive, derived from the Latin future perfect indicative and perfect subjunctive; its use has become greatly limited in recent times. Con ventionally we speak of three regular conju gations in Castilian, denoted usually by their infinitive endings, -ar, -er, -ir; in point of fact the endings of the -er and -ir conjugations are the same for all except four of their many forms, so that the Latin four conjugations have virtually been cut down to two. A number of verbs are perfectly regular as to their endings but show certain variations in their root vow els; they form what are known as the radical changing classes. There are no few irregular verbs.
There are interesting phenomena that might be considered here, but the present purpose may be served by calling attention to one of the most decided peculiarities of the Spanish language, its use of the preposition a, °to, at," before a noun denoting a specific per son, higher animal or personified thing and standing in the accusative relation to a verb : "I see the man" is veo al hombre (literally, "I see to the man"). The order of words in a Spanish clause is a very elastic matter. In general the English declarative order of sub ject, verb, object, is but little adhered to; in a simple statement of fact the verb or the ob ject may begin the clause, so that inversion is frequent in the language.
Menendez, Pidal R. rnatica historica esparto') (4th rev. ed., Madrid 1918); Grolier, (Grundriss der romanischen Philologie,' (article, 'Spanische Sprache," by G. Baist) ; Tomas, T. Navarro, (Manual de pronunciacibn espariola) (Madrid 1918) ; Ford, (Old Spanish Hills and Ford, (Spanish Grammar); Hills and Ford, (First Spanish Course.)