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From: mcv@inter.NL.net (Miguel Carrasquer)
Subject: Re: Spanish accents
Message-ID: <Cz46xy.ry@inter.NL.net>
Organization: /etc/organization
References: <39u7q5$ckb@mother.usf.edu>
Date: Fri, 11 Nov 1994 17:51:33 GMT
Lines: 38

In article <39u7q5$ckb@mother.usf.edu>,
Timothy Miller <millert@grad.csee.usf.edu> wrote:
>Do Spanish accent marks distinguish meaning?  That is to say, if the 
>accent were placed in a different syllable, would the word mean somethind 
>different?

Yes, there are are cases where a word has a different meaning
if the stress falls on a different syllable.  One that springs
to mind is: o'pera (opera), opera (operates).  There are many others,
although in the vast majority of cases, changing the stress to 
another syllable (if available) will only result in a word that 
doesn't exist.  Note that this has nothing to do with the
orthographical accent: English also has "stress minimal pairs",
like content ['kAntent / k@n'tent], without the benefit of
different orthography.

>
>When were these accents created?  Did the Latins use them?  And does the 
>acute accent change the sound in French because in the past the vowel was 
>stressed, and therefore didn't decay toward /E/ or /@/?
>

The Romans did not use accent marks, and really didn't need them:
stress in Latin is fixed, if you know the syllable length...  Length
marks over vowels would have come in handy, though.  The Greeks
did use accents ( ' ` ~ ), since Greek tones are free and differ(ed)
in pitch.  Not that you see accents in Greek inscriptions.  The use of
accents was I believe introduced by Byzantine scribes, probably at the
time when Greek was losing its pitch accent and changed to the modern Greek
`monotoniko' stress pronunciation.
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.  

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