Vuelta a Espana - any Spanish speakers on here?

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Globalti

Legendary Member
I speak Spanish and I have always thought that "La vuelta a Espana" meant "The return to Spain" whereas "La Vuelta de Espana" would mean "The Tour of Spain".

Aren't I right? So why "La Vuelta A Espana"?
 

Archie_tect

De Skieven Architek... aka Penfold + Horace
Location
Northumberland
Just put 'A Espana' into google translate,and it came up as "tour of Spain"
 

marinyork

Resting in suspended Animation
Location
Logopolis
I don't speak any Spanish. Does 'de' always mean 'of'? Does 'a' always mean 'to'? I'd find it unlikely. Are there rules for when talking about countries?

FWIW the Giro d'italia has similar 'issues'. Where giro/girare means many different things like journey, tour, turn, rotate and many more depending on what you put on it. What has this got to do with Spanish? Vuelta appears to my untrained eye to come up with very similar dictionary listings as those that giro/girare does. In italian (mine is bad) I have a book with a list of verbs and propositions and there are as you'd imagine some differences between English/Italian i.e some where English uses the preposition and Italian doesn't and vice versa or a different one is used instead. I'd imagine it's like that in spanish, but don't know the specifics.
 

mangaman

Guest
No

Vuelta a Espana is correct.

It's just an anomaly you have to learn.

You use "a" in that situation, when travelling, to indicate you are touring around the area/town in which you have already arrived. It's not translated as "to" unless it's clear you are travelling to somewhere.

When you are already there it's best translated as "around"
 
OP
OP
Globalti

Globalti

Legendary Member
Speaking a language also means that you learn to accept the occasional idiosyncrasies and lapses of logic!

Best example I can think of in Spanish is the occasional nouns which end in the letter of the other gender; eg: la mano.
 

ASC1951

Guru
Location
Yorkshire
Speaking a language also means that you learn to accept the occasional idiosyncrasies and lapses of logic!

Best example I can think of in Spanish is the occasional nouns which end in the letter of the other gender; eg: la mano.
That is an anomaly which has come straight through from Latin. Most Latin nouns ending in -us are masculine and become -o in Spanish and Italian; 'manus' [hand], though, was feminine. IIRC it is feminine in most European languages, even non-Romance languages. Die Hand in German, for instance.
 
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