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From: aa318@FreeNet.Carleton.CA (John Coughlin)
Subject: Re: Spanish accents
Message-ID: <D04v1D.4x9@freenet.carleton.ca>
Sender: aa318@freenet3.carleton.ca (John Coughlin)
Reply-To: aa318@FreeNet.Carleton.CA (John Coughlin)
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Date: Thu, 1 Dec 1994 13:05:36 GMT
Lines: 25


In a previous article, ccardona@mail1.sas.upenn.edu (Maelstrom) says:

>No to my knowledge you are correct.  Spanish and French usage of accents 
>are totally different.  At least when it comes with the ' accent.  On the 
>other hand the diarises or trema (umlaut in German) is used to voice 
>letters which usually arent i.e. bilingue-bilingual would be pronouced 
>/bilinge/ without the trema on the u.  Also the ~ (tilde) differnciated 
>between the n and gn sounds n / ~n.  But since the ~ is only for the n 
>and the trema is VERY rare the ' is really the main accent in Spanish.
>
Actually, ~ is not an accent in Spanish.  n~ is a letter in the alphabet,
falling between n and o.  In medieval times it was written nn, then it was
written as two small n's stacked on one another, and finally the descenders
of the top n disappeared, resulting in the grapheme we see today.  The same
thing happened with a~, e~, and o~ in Portuguese.  These are not considered
separate letters in the Portuguese alphabet, so I suppose ~ *is* an accent
(specifically a diacritic) in that language.

In Spanish the diaeresis is a diacritic.  Its use is rare, and it only
appears over the letter u, e.g. cigu:en~a (stork).
--
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