Corpora: a particular type of sloppiness

[Rene.Valdes at lhsl.com]

In support of Monika's argument, I'll offer the following two sentences:

     Ya termino.        (I'm finishing soon.)
     Ya terminó.        (It's already finished.)

Without the diacritic, you would not be able to tell which one of these two
meanings to assign to this sentence.  I use diacritics whenever possible,
even at the risk of having my text become garbage when it travels through
cyberspace.

Another interesting case is the very important distinction between año and
ano, two nouns with quite different meanings.

René Valdés
San Diego, California
USA

Monika Merino wrote:
   As a native speaker of Spanish I can tell you that ALL Spanish speakers
   would
   face terrible comprehension problems without diacritics. In many cases,
   diacritics in Spanish are used to "distinguish" homonyms. Take for
   example
   these two cases:
   El niño *se* cayó (The boy feel down)
   *Sé* que será difícil entenderlo (I know it's going to be difficult to
   understand)
   In the first case we're talking about the the reflective form of the
   verb "to
   be" whereas in the second case we're talking about the first person
   singular
   conjugation of the verb "to know". Perhaps in isolated sentences like
   these two
   and in the the "relaxed" and rather artificial situation of "reading
   examples",
   these diacritics might not seem crucial for comprehension. But I can't
   imagine
   what it would be like to have a 5,000-word Spanish text with no
   diacritics!
   It would take ages for native speakers of a language with diacritics to
   get
   used to one without them! And anyway, what's the problem with
   diacritics?
   Monica Merino