Understanding «se» in Spanish

In Spanish, se has a bunch of different meanings:

• Se hizo daño. He/she hurt himself/herself.
• Ellos se pelean. They quarrel/fight [among themselves].
• Se levanta la mano. He/she raises his/her hand.
• Se enojó. He/she became angry.
• Ya se lo dije. I told it to him/her already.
• Se habla español. Spanish is spoken.
• Se dice que... It is said that... / They say that...

Most of the time, se is introduced first as the reflexive third-person pronoun, which is true, but it's often paired with many verbs and phrases that are not reflexive in English. darse cuenta is an idiomatic verb phrase usually best translated as to realize in English. sentarse (to sit down) is rarely used with the reflexive in English, except for emphasis or verbosity, although it is possible (sit yourself down).

Many will explain this as a fundamental difference in the Spanish thinks about verbs, in that certain verbs are inherently reflexive, even if, in English, we omit the reflexive pronoun. This makes sense at a certain level, and is pretty easy to accept: you just have to remember that, whereas a lot of verbs in English can be intransitive in form, but are semantically reflexive, these verbs in Spanish require a reflexive pronoun more often than not. Fair enough.

Then we come into the rule that le transforms into se before lo or la. This is usually explained on the basis of ease of pronunciation, and is another rule that can be accepted. It's just something to remember.

And then we come to the "passive reflexive" or "impersonal reflexive", from which we get se dice que, se sabe que, and sí, se puede. For me, this use of se was the easiest to internalize, because of the myriad phrases in which it's common, and which translate well to corresponding English phrases involving impersonal you or they that are probably just as common.

None of this should be new to anyone who's studied Spanish for a while, and I wouldn't be blogging about the various uses of se just for the sake of listing and explaining them, because that's already been done, and probably in more clarity than I just did. With the caveat that I haven't formally studied linguistics, the reason that I'm blogging about this topic is that I was curious how se came to be used as an impersonal pronoun, because this phenomenon of using the third-person reflexive pronoun as an impersonal pronoun exists in other Indo-European languages.

It turns out that this all stems from the mediopassive voice. With the usual caveats involving Wikipedia, its article on mediopassive voice is a decent introduction. Mediopassive voice was/is used for, among other situations, reflexive/reciprocal actions, cases where the subject changed its own state, certain stative verbs, and verbs that are semantically passive but not grammatically so (e.g., this sells well in English).

Over time, the distinct mediopassive voice as a separate conjugation became lost, and was replaced by the use of the reflexive pronoun. (My guess is that the reflexive made sense because the mediopassive involved many situations involving oneself). The Wikipedia article gives Spanish as a particular example of a Romance language that developed this, and explains why, for example, enojarse should not truly be viewed as a true reflexive verb, but rather as a mediopassive verb (although the wording in the article makes this point a bit unclearly). Another example that lucha fans might recognize is dice llamarse (says to be called) Here, se is better interpreted as a passive/impersonal construction rather than a true reflexive.

It's then logical to assume that the other impersonal constructions involving se (se dice que, se puede, se habla, etc.) were not too far of a leap from the original pure mediopassive voice.

Knowledge of how se came to be used in this way isn't necessary by any means to being able to use and understand Spanish effectively, because there are other not-too-difficult ways of remembering its usage. But understanding the rhyme and reason behind many of the seemingly disparate uses of se does involve going back and understanding a little bit of mediopassive voice and how it was used in older languages.