Breakdown of Ya oscurece y el silencio aterrador desespera a mi hermano.
y
and
el hermano
the brother
mi
my
ya
already / now (right now)
Questions & Answers about Ya oscurece y el silencio aterrador desespera a mi hermano.
Why is desespera used without a reflexive pronoun here? I usually see it as desesperarse.
While desesperarse means "to despair" or "to become exasperated" (describing an internal change of state), the non-reflexive desesperar is used transitively to mean "to drive someone to despair" or "to exasperate." Here, the silence is the subject performing the action on the brother, so it is just desespera.
Why is there an a before mi hermano?
This is the "personal a". Even though the sentence talks about causing an emotion, mi hermano is the direct object of the verb desespera. Whenever a specific, identifiable person is the direct object of a verb, Spanish requires the preposition a right before it.
How does oscurece translate to "is getting dark"? Doesn't Spanish use a verb for "getting" here?
Spanish frequently uses specialized verbs to express weather or time changes that English handles with "getting" or "becoming" plus an adjective. Oscurecer (from the adjective oscuro) inherently means "to get dark" or "to grow dark," so ya oscurece perfectly captures "it is already getting dark" all by itself.
How is the word aterrador formed?