I haven't written anything in weeks, which is terrible since I can actually feel my brain getting rusty... Many ideas came up to my mind while doing the everyday chores, although they'd fall apart as soon as I'd think through them.
We talked about stuff falling apart, or more precisely, breaking stuff apart in a previous post. Let's now look into a word with quite the opposite idea... Not precisely putting stuff back together, but what you get when you do it: a whole, el todo.
Todo means all, but it can also mean every, whole, entire, and even each. That shouldn't be a surprise since todo sounds similar to total, both words having the same origin in the Latin totus, meaning "all, all at once, the whole, entire, altogether". I'll explain the different -but related- meanings of this word, and some common phrases we use in everyday spanish as well.
Todo - The spanish superlative
So... What does "superlative" means? Well, we use superlatives all the time when we want to express that something is greater than any other possible thing. They're particularly easy to form in the English language since you only have to add the suffix -est to the word being used to describe something (adjective or adverb).
- Mi primo Arturo siempre fue el niño más alto de todos en su colegio.
- My cousin Arturo had been always the tallest of all children in his school.
See how it's much easier for you english speakers to say the tallest, healthiest, dirtiest, nearest, etc. In spanish you have to add the más in front of the characteristic you're describing. It's definitely a bit clunky but that's how we do it. Literally translated would be something like "the most tall", if that makes sense...The difference here between English and Spanish would be that, you don't really need to say "the tallest of all" don't you? It's more than enough with saying "the tallest", we get the idea. Whereas in Spanish, you kind of need to put the "todos" to emphasize that same fact.
- Pancho come más lento que Bruno, pero Jhonny es el más lento de todos.
- Pancho eats slower than Bruno, but Jhonny is the slowest.
You can see it better here. In spoken Spanish, people would normally say as you see in the example, since we've already said "más lento" once, we have to add the "de todos" to make sure we're talking about the slowest at the end of the sentence.
Todo - The whole, the entire
The way we use this todo is probably the most simmilar to the English version of it. Although is probably more related to "entire" since they both come from Latin... Well, actually from Old French, product of the french domination in england around the XI century.
- Asegúrate de que todo el pollo esté descongelado antes de sazonarlo.
- Make sure the whole chicken is thawed before seasoning it.- ¿Sabes cómo cocinar un pollo entero en el horno?
- Do you know how to cook a whole chicken in the oven?
The idea is pretty much the same, although I'm not too surentire sound in this context, maybe not very good. And yeah, I could have used the verb bake instead of cook, or even hornear instead of cocinar, but let's not get too fancy about that.
e about how good would the word
- Pasamos el día entero/todo el día tratando de broncearnos en la azotea.
- We spent the entire day trying to get a tan on the roof.
- Este libro debería ser leído por el mundo entero/todo el mundo.
- This book should be read by the entire world.
Both versions are inerchangeable almost every time. You should be able to play with those "el/la ... entero/entera" and "todo/toda el/la ..." constructions by now. It's not that hard as it seems and people repeat them todo el tiempo. Just be careful! You can't say "el tiempo entero"... Why? Well, I don't know, it just doesn't sound right, must be an idiomatic thing. Same with the chicken examples above. You can say both todo el pollo and el pollo entero, but there's a different connotation between them... Let's say you go to the market and you want to buy... ehmm... chicken:
- Un pollo entero por favor. - Un todo el pollo por favor.
- A whole chicken please. - A chicken in its totallity please. (?)
GOOD WRONG
I hope you can get the feel of it. Definitely a matter of practice and specially, listening a lot to native speakers, specially chicken lovers.
Check the second part of this post here!
