It has been a long time since the city of Valladolid, the heart of Castilla and one of the most Spanish towns imaginable, will be declared the universal capital of the Hispanic language. By its own glory and grace, the Castilian city declared itself the place where “the best Spanish in the world” was spoken, the purest. Adventurous words for a language community of 500 million inhabitants.
It happened at the same time as in Valladolid and the province, as well as in much of old Castilla and Madrid, the use of personal pronouns is nothing short of conflicting. Valladolid, Zamora, Salamanca and part of León are leists, while Madrid, the capital of Spain, is immersed in laism. Strange as it may seem, the “neutral Spanish” of Castile was spoken with a systematic and rather obvious misspelling.
We should not blame them: the differences between “lo”, “la” and “le” are one of the most common headaches of any Spanish-speaker on whatever side of the Atlantic they are. The RAE is aware of this and warns that, despite the apparent simplicity of the standard, it is common for various variants dialects incur leism, loism or laism. The famous “well I said that” that any non-Madrilenian on the peninsula will have parodied at some time.
There are several manuals on the use of personal pronouns throughout the web, and one of the most useful is this complex but very didactic graphic from Sin Faltas. It starts from a very simple dilemma: “Does the complement correspond to the + participle?”. And from there, the chaos.
For the RAE the matter is simple: as long as the object of our sentence is direct we will have to use “lo” or “la”. In the event that the pronoun comes to act as an indirect object, we will have to opt for the “le”. With one simple exception: given its usual use in the cultured register of Spanish, the “le” may be used as a direct object as long as the reference is a man. Well, from these wickers the almost infinite cascade of exceptions comes off.
In practical examples, we can say “Have you seen Juan? Yes, it I saw yesterday “and” Have you seen Juan? Yes, you I saw yesterday “, but we won’t be able to say” Have you picked up the children? Yes, them I picked up before going to the workshop. “In the latter case, the action of the verb is directed directly towards the children (they are direct object) so we must use “the” in an obligatory way. The same thing happens in “I bought the medicine and gave it to him without anyone seeing me” (I gave him the medicine without anyone seeing me).
Complications usually arise with the indirect object variant. In “I apologized to my mother” the request is not directed towards apologies, but to “my mother”, so the personal pronoun works as an indirect object. Thus, we could not say “I apologized to my mother” (which, we already said, is famous in the center of the peninsula) or “I told her brother to come” (case of loísmo, common in Andean parts of Peru and Bolivia and on the Cantabrian coast of the peninsula).
As the graph / map indicates, the key to using pronouns correctly is identify clearly what the verb refers to. In “I said nonsense”, nonsense is “what was said” (the norm: lo / la + participle); while in “I said nonsense to Ana”, Ana is not what was said (which makes her the indirect object of the sentence, so we have to inevitably choose “her”).
Once here, there are numerous exceptions and variants to the use of “lo”, “la” and “le” marked by the simple rule of the RAE. In general, to punish the exceptional use of “le” in cases of direct object. The important thing about the graph, in addition to its didactic capacity, is that it emphasizes something that most of us speakers of the Spanish language already knew: that personal pronouns and their correct or incorrect use are, very often, a nightmare. A beautiful grammatical nightmare.