I'm getting into the groove of speaking Spanish regularly. Admittedly it's one of the easier languages for an Anglophone to learn. The pronunciation is entirely regular and uniform: once you learn the basic sounds, all words sound like how they look; there's nothing to compare with our English weirdnesses like 'taught/sort' or 'out/drought'. Nor do they have randomly varying plurals such as 'house/houses' and 'mouse/mice'. There aren't too many irregular verbs, and those that do exist are easy enough to learn and remember. Tenses can be translated easily from English to Spanish - not just 'I am' and 'I was', but also things like 'I had been' and 'I will have been' and so on. Best of all, there's none of this German nonsense about ze verb at ze end of ze sentence putting.
One little challenge is that the subjunctive mood is much more present in Spanish. You can't translate directly an English sentence like 'What do you want me to do if the shop's closed?' It has to use the subjunctive, which in English would probably be something archaic like 'What do you want that I should do, if the shop be closed?' Fortunately the subjunctive is much simpler to form in Spanish - it's generally just a change of one word, a different conjugation of the verb. In English we don't say 'I wouldn't do that if I am you'; instead we say 'I wouldn't do that if I were you'. Well, in Spanish every verb has its equivalent to the change of 'am' to 'were', but generally it just means changing a letter or two at the end of the verb.
An example: I was approached by an homeless person in Valladolid and she asked me for some spare change, '...aunque sea poco'. This translates as '...though it be little', which sounds quite posh to English ears. I gave her a euro.
Now you may be wondering (if indeed you're still reading) - why is Edd waffling on about Spanish grammar? In truth it's because I'm running out of other things to waffle about. There isn't really all that much going on in my life right now. It's not like last year's travels, when there was a change of country and language with almost every single blog post. And these Spanish towns, lovely as they are, don't really vary all that much. I'm well aware that my photos of churches & cathedrals & plazas & Old Towns must all kind of merge into one after a while...
Zamora is notable for the fact that it contains more Romanesque churches than anywhere else in Europe. (Rome included). But I don't have any particular interest in Romanesque churches. Nor, I imagine, do any of my readers. So I guess I'll leave it there. This week's Edd vs Food is a bit of a humdinger, by the way!
 |
| Zamora city walls, seen from across the Douro. Do a doggy paddle in this river for long enough and you end up in Porto. |
 |
| Cathedral, seen from Castle |
 |
| Cathedral again, seen from its own front yard |
 |
| One of the nicer church interiors. I forget which one. |
 |
| Edd vs Food #87 Full Spanish breakfast, curated and home-made by me. This took nearly as long to eat as it did to make. |
