In its chief grammatical usages Spanish ac cords with French, Portuguese, Italian, and the other Romance languages. A decided pecu liarity is the use of the preposition U, 'to,' before the direct object of a verb, when that object represents a person, e.g. rco fi nn) amigo, '1 see my friend.' Like Portuguese, Spanish has two verbs 'to have' (toner and labor, the latter used as an auxiliary in conjugation) and two verbs 'to be' (ester and scr), and in each case the functions of the verbs are distinct. With ester and the gerund of a principal verb there may be formed a very useful periphrastic conjugation corresponding to the English progressive form, thus, Juan esta estudiando, 'John is studying.' Instead of the four• conjugations of Latin there are but three in Spanish; furthermore, regular verbs of the Spanish second conjugation and the Spanish third conjugation differ in only four forms, viz. the present infinitive, the first and second per sons plural of the present indicative, and the second plural of the imperative. There are cer tain radical-changing verbs which, though per fectly regular as to their endings, change their root vowels c and o under the accent, and, in some cases where they are not accented, to the diphthongs is and ye respectively, or, going a stage farther, to the simple vowels i and u. The subjunctive mood persists with much more vigor than in most modern languages: besides the usual present and imperfect tenses, it has a second imperfect form (called also the conditional sub junctive), which is properly a descendant of the Latin pluperfect indicative, and upon occasion may still be used as an indicative pluperfect or aorist in Spanish, and also a future tense. Auxili aries are used to form the compound tenses. as in the sister Romance tongues, but, contrary to the custom in French and Italian, it is 'to have' (habcr) and not 'to be' that forms the perfect tenses of reflexive verbs, thus, se ha lisenkado, 'he has flattered himself.' The neuter gender survives in the case of the singular of the definite article lo, of the demonstrative words. csto, eso, aquello, and of the objective pronoun of the third person lo. These neuter forms occur only in indefinite and general constructions, and then the neuter article, always accompanied by an adjective (or an adverb), forms abstract ex pressions, thus, /o Lucile, 'the good' = `good ness.' Latin, of course, forms the basis of the Span ish vocabulary, but there is an admixture of words from other sources. There are doubtful traces of words from pre-Romance languages, such as Iberian and Celtic and the speech of the Punic invaders and colonists. Despite trading relations, no permanent acquisitions seem to have been made from Greek until after the Roman conquest. The Visigothic invasion brought a few
Germanic words, and that of the Arabs brought in a host of Oriental words, many of which are easily detected by the prefixed Arabic article al. In the eleventh century many lexical elements came from beyond the Pyrenees with the entrance of French soldiers, ecclesiastics, and colonists, and an infusion of Italian elements was occa sioned by Aragonese domination in Italy and by the great vogue of Italian poetry in the Spanish Peninsula during the fifteenth and sixteenth cen turies. Colonial relations have led to the intro duction of a few terms from Indian and other sources; and learned influences have constantly increased the stock of borrowings from Latin, Greek, and French.
Traces of written Spanish are found in Latin deeds and grants as early as the eighth century, but the first really important Spanish document is one of the eleventh century, containing a series of glosses, and literature in Spanish does not be gin until the twelfth century, in so far as the extant documents are concerned.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. The second decade of the Bibliography. The second decade of the eighteenth century saw the founding of the Span ish Academy, and the results of its activity were a Diccionario de la lengua castellaina rid, 1726-39), an Ortografia (1742), and a Grametica (ib., )771; new ed. 1895). An abridged edition of the Diccionario was produced in 1780, and has been repeatedly revised (13th ed., ib., 1899). Among the many dictionaries, grammatical treatises, etc., may be mentioned: Salvh. Nuevo diccionario de la lengua eastellaca (7th ed., Paris, 1865) ; Dominguez, Diccionario national, 6 gran diccionario ehisico (le la leng-ua cspaiiela (15th ed., i\-ladrid, 18S2) ; Barcia, Primer diccionario general camologice (ib., 1881-83) ; De Eguilaz y Yanguas, Glosario camologice de las palabras espatiolcs de origen oriental (Granada, 1886) ; Dozy and Engdmann, Glossaire des mots espagnols et portugais de rives de l'arabe (2d ed.. Leyden, 1869) Cuervo, Diccionario de construccion y regimen dc la lengua rash-Dana (Paris, 1886 et seq.) ; Lopes and Bensley, Nuevo diecionario ingles-espaiiol y espaiiol-ingles (ib., 1900) ; VelaEquez de la Gar dena, New Pronouncing Dictionary of the Span ish and English Languages (rev. ed., New York, 1900) ; Bustamante, Dictionary of the Spanish and English Languages (Paris, 1897) ; Bello and Cuervo, Gramatira de la lengua castellana (6th ed., ib., 1S98) ; Knapp, Grammar of the Modern Spanish Language (New York. 1882) ; Ramsey, Tert-Book of Modern Spanish (new ed., ib., 1902) ; Garner, Spanish grammar (ib., Edgren, Elementary Spanish Grammar (ib.. 1899) ; Baist, "Die spanische Sprache," in Grol ber, Grundriss der romanischen Philologie, vol. i. (Strassbnrg, 1888).