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     Spanish, though perhaps underappreciated due to its modernity and ubiquity, contains many features that can serve as inspiration for conlangers wishing to design a naturalistic language.

1) Phonology:

     Spanish has a basic 5-vowel system: [a], [e], [i], [o], and [u]. Unlike its ancestor Latin, Spanish does not feature length distinctions between short and long forms of the vowels.

     Three interesting phonemes are found within dialects of Spanish:

• The voiced palatal fricative [ʝ], which developed from historic [j] or [ʎ].
• The palatal lateral [ʎ], which developed from historic [l:] and initial [pl], [kl], and [fl] clusters.
• The palatal nasal [ɲ], which comes from historic [n:].

     The letter <ñ> used to represent [ɲ] was formed from the second <n> of the digraph <nn> meaning [n:] being written above the first.

2) Tense, Aspect and Mood:

     Spanish verbs, along with person marking, contain complex tense-aspect-mood (TAM) information. Such encoded meaning includes:

• Three basic tenses: past, present, and future.
• Four basic moods: subjunctive, imperative, indicative, and conditional.
• Four aspects: perfect, perfective, imperfect, and simple.
• Miscelleneous forms: infinitive, gerund, and past participle.

3) Noun Gender:

      Having reduced its amount of noun classes from the Masculine-Feminine-Neuter genders of Classical Latin, Spanish retained a major distinction only between the Masculine and Feminine.

     Articles and adjectives must agree with the nouns they modify in gender and number.

4) Punctuation:

     Spanish has two punctuation marks not found in English to mark the beginning of special clauses.

• <¡>, an inverted exclamation mark, is used to mark the beginning of an exclamatory phrase.

• <¿>, an inverted question mark, is used to mark the beginning of an interrogative phrase.

5) Leísmo:

     In some varieties of Spanish, the indirect object pronoun “le” may be used in lieu of the direct object pronouns “lo” or “la”. One plausible theory as to why this occurs is that the 2nd person formal pronouns “usted” and “ustedes” are conjugated for the 3rd person in verbs, and both out of politeness and a desire to avoid confusion between 2nd person and 3rd person pronouns, the distinct indirect object pronoun is used.

Without leísmo:

“Yo la ayudè.” = “I helped you/her.”

With leísmo:

“Yo le ayudè.” = “I helped you (formal).”

6) Personal “a”:

     The preposition “a” means “at/to” in Spanish. When the direct object of a verb is a person or anthropomorphized inanimate noun, we use “a” before the referent. Thus:

Inanimate direct object:

“I know this place.” = “Yo concozco este lugar.”

Animate direct object:

“I know John.” = “Yo conozco a John”.

7) Hints of Agglutination:

     In contexts using infinitives, gerunds, or imperatives, the direct and indirect object pronouns may fuse to the end of the verb. This is a rudimentary form of polypersonal agreement. This is exemplified through the command:

“¡Dámelo!” = “Give it to me!”

• Dá = 2nd person singular informal imperative form of the verb “to give”.
• -me = 1st person singular indirect object marker.
• -lo = 3rd person singular masculine direct object marker.

     I hope you’ve enjoyed learning some of the interesting features of Spanish, and that this has provided some inspiration for your next (or current) conlanging project!