los García = the García family, but What about the Simpsons?
This is something which is similar to English, but it has a little grammatical / spelling twist in Spanish. For example, when referring to a married couple or an entire family in English we can refer to them as "the Smiths":
"Listen to all that noise - the Smiths must be fighting again".
Please notice the "s" that we added onto "Smith" in English, because you DONT ADD AN "S" in Spanish. The above sentence in Spanish is:
"Escucha ese jaleo - los Smith estarán peleándose otra vez."
Here are a few more examples using Spanish names, even though it sounds weird (to me) to put the extra "s" on the end of the Spanish last names:
1. Soy amigo de los Rodriguez desde hace años. - I've been a friend of the Rodriguezes for years.
2. Por fin conocí a los García anoche. - I finally met Mr. and Mrs. García last night OR I finally met the García family last night.
3. De todos los vecinos los Santillana son los que mejor me caen = Of all the neighbors I like the Santiallanas the best.
One interesting exception to this is the popular series "The Simpsons". If you do a Google search, you'll see a roughly equal number of hits for "los Simpson" (without the "s") and "los Simpsons" (with the "s"). I think that this is because many Spanish speaking people who translated "the Simpsons" just translated it as they saw it without realizing that the name is actually "Simpson" as in "Homer Simpson". The correct form should be "los Simpson" following normal usage in the Spanish language.
Brad
