LINGUISTIC CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF “THE LITTLE PRINCE.” (UNIT 6)

Currently, we live in a huge world where we all connect with everyone. This is the reason why learning languages is a great tool for the progress as a student or as a professional. Learning other languages can enrich our knowledge in order to know new cultures, but in the stage of learning, you can find some differences in grammatical interpretation such as syntax, semantics, and morphology that infer in understanding the meaning of the words. Recent research shows that there are many difficulties in the process of learning a language completely different from the native.

At first, in “The Little Prince” there are a lot of syntactic differences between English and Spanish version. Syntactic determines the order of the words in a sentence. In English, adjectives are before the noun which modifies a good example is “on a very simple, yet majestic, throne”, and in Spanish is the opposite. In addition, in English the subject is at the beginning of the sentences “The little prince inquired timidly,” but in Spanish the subject is at the end of the sentences.

Secondly, there are semantic differences that give other meanings of the same word depending on the context of sentences, for example, in English, the sentence “The king sat” it takes the verb “sit” referring to the same sentence in Spanish “El rey estaba instalado” giving a different context because of the use of the verb in this case “instalar.”

Furthermore, you can find differences in grammatical rules. In English there are at least 3 commas, but there are not in Spanish, at the same time you can note a kind of subject because in Spanish there are not a subject in the sentence “No sabía que” in contrast in English, you have to use a subject “He did not know that…”

In conclusion, there are a lot of differences between both languages, and there are a lot of words which have the same meaning, but these are applied to different contexts. As we noticed that could be a factor that change the meaning of the text, and it shows us that there are many ways to report something. Moreover, each language has its own grammatical rules and it is important to know it in order to develop our knowledge. If you want to learn a new language, never give up, never get tired of trying, and never forget to practice. You will find it exciting. Despite, how difficult it can be because of its marked differences.

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