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<br> I am also a native Spanish speaker,
and I think that some
<br> precisions are required on what one understand by "diacritic"
<p> I think that the examples that Rene provided
about "termino" and "terminó"
<br> (which can be extended to almost any regular verb to distinguish
<br> present and past tenses: canto/cantó,
miro/miró, hablo/habló, etc.)
<br> can not be considered diacritics, since they indicate
where the stress
<br> is in the word, that is, "termino" is pronounced
with the stress on
<br> the "i", while "terminó" is stressed on the
"o". There is a phonetic
<br> difference that *must* be written to provide the
reader with the
<br> same information that a hearer would have.
<p> On the other hand, the example
on "sé" (I know) and "se" (reflexive mark)
<br> is a real diacritic, because it provides a
distinction between two words
<br> that sound the same although mean different
things.
<p> My feeling is that if a hearer
can disambiguate "sé" and "se" by context,
<br> a reader should be able to do the same without
diacritics. Although the diacritic
<br> *does* provide information (I am no
expert, but I dare say that it is some
<br> kind of prosodic information, since
sé-verb and se-reflexive have different
<br> roles in the sentence, so the diacritic
helps the reader in finding the right
<br> prosody), it is a rather weak information
(I mean, not imprescindible
<br> to understand).
<p> Obviously this is not true when the accent
indicates a real phonetic difference as
<br> in "termino/terminó".
<br>
<p> best
<p> Lluis
<br>
<br>
<p>Bruce Lambert wrote:
<blockquote TYPE=CITE>I'm a pretty strong believer in context as a disambiguator,
and human
<br>beings are amazingly talented at correctly going beyond the information
<br>given. So my hunch is that a great deal of text without diacritics
can
<br>still be unambiguously understood by the majority of readers. In fact,
if
<br>Spanish or Czech (or whatever language that uses diacritics) email
messages
<br>are often sent without diacritics, then I take this as an existence
proof
<br>that, to some extent, they are not needed for satisfactory comprehension.
<br> </blockquote>
(...)
<blockquote TYPE=CITE>
<br>At 11:50 AM 4/19/01 -0700, Rene.Valdes@lhsl.com wrote:
<p>>In support of Monika's argument, I'll offer the following two sentences:
<br>>
<br>> Ya termino.
(I'm finishing soon.)
<br>> Ya terminó.
(It's already finished.)
<br>>
<br>>Without the diacritic, you would not be able to tell which one of
these two
<br>>meanings to assign to this sentence. I use diacritics whenever
possible,
<br>>even at the risk of having my text become garbage when it travels
through
<br>>cyberspace.</blockquote>
<br>
<p>
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<table>
<tr>
<td><b><font color="#0000AA"><font size=+1>Lluís Padró i
Cirera </font></font></b></td>
<td><font color="#2F2F66">UNIVERSITAT POLITÈCNICA DE CATALUNYA </font>
<br><b><font color="#2F2F66">Departament de Llenguatges i Sistemes Informàtics</font></b></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><font color="#0000AA">Tel: XX-34-934 015 652 </font>
<br><font color="#0000AA">Fax: XX-34-934 017 014 </font>
<br><a href="mailto:padro@lsi.upc.es">padro@lsi.upc.es</a>
<br><a href="http://www.lsi.upc.es/~padro" target="_top">http://www.lsi.upc.es/~padro</a></td>
<td><font color="#2F2F66">Mòdul C6 - Campus Nord </font>
<br><font color="#2F2F66">Jordi Girona Salgado 1-3 </font>
<br><font color="#2F2F66">08034 Barcelona</font></td>
</tr>
</table>
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