The Double Plural
Redundancy in Rural Costa Rican Spanish
In high school Spanish classes everyone learns that standard Spanish tolerates the double negative.
"No tengo nada", translating literally as "I don't have nothing", is correct standard
Spanish. In rural parts of Costa Rica, however, there is another "double standard" so to speak
that is not actually "standard". (That just gave plays on words a bad name) Rural Costa Ricans
often use a double plural with nouns ending in a tonic vowel. These words are very few and far
between, the most common of which are 'mamá' and 'papá', nicknames for mother and
father respectively (mom and dad, if you will). When a rural Costa Rican pluralizes these nouns,
instead of simply adding an 's', they add an 'ses'. This phenomenon appears to be a double pluralization
of the noun. The 's' is added, implying the plural, and then an 'es' is added after that, the
standard plural suffix for nouns ending in a consonant. (The only problem here is that the actual
noun root does not end in a consonant)
This phenomenon often results in the following forms:
-
mamá -> mamases
-
papá -> papases
-
??? ñandú -> ñanduses ??? (ñandú is a tall, ostrich-like bird of South America)
This last example shows another word that I presume to be a part of this non-standard rule of
the double plural. Since I haven't actually heard it, and thus cannot verify my rule of the
double plural being applied to all such nouns ending in a tonic vowel, I enclose the example
in question marks.
This double plural doesn't have a good causal explanation. It is simply how rural Costa Ricans
speak. I am only concerned with finding the rules, all be them arbitrary, that the locals use
to communicate with each other. So, to sum up my findings: Nouns that end in an accentuated
vowel are pluralized with the non-standard suffix '-ses'.
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