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From: mcv@inter.NL.net (Miguel Carrasquer)
Subject: Re: Spanish accents
Message-ID: <CzDvnD.Gr6@inter.NL.net>
Organization: NLnet
References: <39u7q5$ckb@mother.usf.edu> <Cz46xy.ry@inter.NL.net> <3ac4jb$oi1@mother.usf.edu>
Date: Wed, 16 Nov 1994 23:23:37 GMT
Lines: 29

In article <3ac4jb$oi1@mother.usf.edu>,
Timothy Miller <millert@grad.csee.usf.edu> wrote:
>Miguel Carrasquer (mcv@inter.NL.net) wrote:
>
>: I'm not sure when the marks were introduced in Spanish, but it must have 
>: been relatively late, like in French, with the introduction of Language 
>: Academies.  
>
>So, are the diacritics used in, say, Spanish and French similar because 
>they are familiar to latin languages, but did not necessarily evolve from 
>the same function?  In Spanish, it's intonation, while in French, the 
>acute, for example, changes pronounciation.  So, if the academics 
>introduced the accents after the languages had split, then they chose 
>them to reprent things which were appropriate for that language, rather 
>than based on how they'd been used in the past?

Basically, yes. French and Catalan use the acute for close vowels
(e', o', i', u'), the grave for open vowels (e`, o`, a`).  This 
has no precedent in Greek accentuation, and I assume it was invented
at some point (where?).  Castilian doesn't distinguish open and close
variants of e, so only the acute is used (the tilde doesn't count:
it's a superscript "n" originally).  Portuguese uses a different
system: the *close* vowels are written e^, o^ (with circumflex),
the *open* ones with an acute (e', o').

-- 
Miguel Carrasquer         ____________________  ~~~
Amsterdam                [                  ||]~  
mcv@inter.NL.net         ce .sig n'est pas une .cig 
