I’ve got a great post showing an assignment my granddaughter got. Classic legacy. (BTW, that’s the name of her soccer league, too)
But in checking her assignment for her, I realized I wasn’t sure about the subtleties of putting the expression “I saw a girl making handicrafts” into Spanish. I initially put ‘hacer’ but thought there might be something better. So, checking my favorite, MLA Modern Spanish, and Butt & Benjamin (my real favorite is Ramsey but it was too high on the shelf. I’m only 5’6”). There I found out that using the infinitive, vi a una chica hacer artesanias, meant the work was finished. A clause would be normal, vi a una chica que estaba hacienda.
But that led me to checking out the use of the gerund in Spanish and Butt & Benjamin are a bit maddening; after giving rules related to the gerund’s adverbial characteristics, they go on to say that colloquial Spanish and even good authors violate some of these rules. So would you say Vi a una chica hacienda artesanias?
A great contrastive example was given in B & B: El cartero trajo una carta pidiendo dinero means the mailman was asking for money, not the letter.
Pat’s Polemics
On-going brilliance
