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- Little Progress on the Spanish Steps
Aboard the plane to the eternal city
Once the spring comes round at last
I have time to ponder the mystery
Of a language course I never passed.
Still with wandering steps and slow,
Hand in hand we take our casual way
Up and down the familiar hills of Spoleto
Searching for the words we long to say.
Should have studied Spanish like the rest of the slackers. Of course getting on toward 50 years later, it’s almost all gone from my poor little brain. But it does at least bear more resemblance to Italian.
Question: do the Spanish believe that sentences should have subjects? Or do they believe, with these heathen Italians, that one can just as easily worm the subject into the predicate on the assumption that the endings of the verb make the person of the subject clear? Well, let me myself just say: I, for one, find the whole operation clear as mud.