Languagle #50: Spanish
Del dicho al hecho, hay un trecho
"From saying to doing, there's quite a stretch."
What it means
There is a long way between saying something and doing it. People promise more than they deliver. The three rhyming words (dicho, hecho, trecho) make it one of the best-known Spanish sayings.
What kind of saying it is
Oral tradition. In Spanish, a refrán. Passed down by word of mouth. Sayings like this have no single author.
About the Spanish language
Spanish is a Romance language with around 500 million native speakers, the second largest native-speaker population in the world after Mandarin. It is official in 20 countries, most of them in the Americas. Spanish grew out of the Latin spoken in the Iberian Peninsula and absorbed thousands of words from Arabic during nearly eight centuries of Moorish rule. Its spelling is very phonetic, and the ñ is its most recognisable letter.